You can't resist it (CC M/L, Teen) Part 5/5 Feb 14 2010

[Chrisken]

Title: You can't resist it.
Disclaimer: I don't own the rights to Roswell, the Pod Chamber, Max, or especially Liz. Just makin' stuff up. (Like Blackie's Grill, which is my own invention.)
Pairings/Couples/Category: Romance/Suspense Max/Liz
Rating: Teen
Summary: After Max takes a step up in 'Balance', Liz comes to him on New Year's Eve, and persuades him that it's time for him to step up again, and spend the day together trying to work out their fears about what they feel for each other. But Max comes back with a restriction - that they can't kiss until midnight, and a challenge - to find the cave where their pods have been hidden for more than ten years!
Dreamer insurance free to all. This is much more of an exclusively shipper piece than usual for me - Isabel appears at the beginning a bit, and she'll return with Alex and Michael for cameos at the end. But in general it's all about Max and Liz.

I was vacuuming the living room, and trying to actually do a reasonably good job and not keep getting distracted, when the front doorbell rang, so I didn't pay that much attention. Figured that it would be some friend of my mom's dropping by to offer her something for the party tonight, or offer regrets in person or whatever. She had to call my name twice from the front hall before I actually looked up.

"Max? You've got a visitor waiting out on the porch," she said with a secretive Mom-like kind of a smile. My initial reaction must have seemed very startled. "Turn off the machine, and leave it over next to the fireplace, out of the way enough that nobody'll run into it, but well within sight so that we all remember these carpets aren't done yet. Yes, that's fine honey, and don't keep your friend waiting any longer."

I'm not normally one to get bossed around quite so thoroughly by my mother, I have to explain, but I'd already gotten the talking to from Dad about doing everything I could to help her out, since today was such an important day for her, and my mind was still partly off on other things no matter how hard I tried to concentrate. For all of these reasons, I was particularly blown away when I got out to the porch and confirmed that my 'friend' was definitely not Michael. Like he'd have been content to wait outside, or come to the front door in the first place, really. I hadn't especially been expecting it to be him, and wasn't at all sure if I was expecting anybody.

But for Liz Parker to come to my doorstep, this morning of all days, was something that I hadn't counted on.

She looked as gorgeous as ever, and my first mental reaction to this was to direct a bit of scorn at Mom for not doing anything more to warn me - she had to have known that Liz isn't just a 'friend' at this point, though I'm not sure if she's aware of the specifics of the one week that we dated, earlier this month, right after the heatwave. Actually, there are a lot of specifics that I really hope Mom knows nothing about - like how that week ended, and some of the things about how it started. Most of the middle would only be usually embarassing, aside from a threat to the rules of my existence.

But anyway - Liz Parker! (Yes, I've probably said this line before, but Liz deserves an exclamation point for nothing other than being herself.) Her brown eyes seemed to spear through my brain as she leaned against the wooden railing and looked back at me, and then after taking a single breath, she nodded her head and started talking, even though I wasn't prepared for whatever she might have to say yet. "Okay, I realize that it took some nerve to come up here and knock on your door, considering the way that you left things with me."

"Umm - yeah," I agreed. "Shows chutzpah, but then, that's an underrated quality I think."

She smiled that sunny smile that usually makes me think that everything's going to be alright, but today I wasn't sure if I could believe it. "Okay, give me full marks for chutzpah then. Max, I have a few things to ask you, on this day of all days. That night we - the night Michael was cured in River Dog's cave, you said that you needed to take a step back, for a while."

I was starting to get a sense of where Liz was heading, and for the life of me I couldn't decide whether I wanted to go there with her. "Um, yes, that's what I said," I agreed. Everything seemed to be overwhelming, even the brilliant blue of the winter Roswell sky, and Liz's own presence - forget about it. I hadn't managed anything close to mental equilibrium since seeing her, and it was a little surprising that my physical balance had lasted for this long without an obvious weakening in the knees.

The 'December heatwave', of course, was weeks behind us, but the weather on this particular late December day was - well, cool but not cold. We *do* occasionally get cold weather and even snow, even out here in the Southern desert, but we also have a lot of surprisingly mild and warm weather when the rest of the country is in winter. Put this scene slap in the middle. I was starting to feel a bit chilly standing outside in only my oldest pair of dockers, (they made good cleaning clothes,) and a fairly thin short sleeved t-shirt. I hadn't thought of grabbing a jacket or anything when Mom told me to go outside. Liz was dressed a bit more appropriately for the weather, at least, with a rose-purplish sweater clinging to her upper body everywhere, and even tighter blue jeans on. A part of me wondered if she was deliberately dressing up to toy with me, to provoke some kind of a reaction. I wouldn't have thought of Liz for that kind of maneuver, though my sister is a master artiste at it - but I couldn't explain why she'd moved away from her more usual and casual styles for today.

"Okay, so then - I think that we've been more than one step away from each other - though that may be partly my fault," Liz continued. "I wasn't sure how easy it would be for me to stay around you but not too close, and I guess that I wouldn't have been able to take it too well if you'd told me off for getting too close again. But - but 'for a while' implies that we can get close again at some point, and I guess that today I wanted to push the issue, to not give you all the choice of when things happened between us, if I could help it."

Right. That was more or less what I thought she was leading up to. "It's not just you," I admitted. "I've been avoiding you - more than I meant to, when I said - what I said to you. And for the same reasons - I thought it would hurt to be around you, and to know that I couldn't - couldn't be with you the way we were; couldn't kiss you again. And if my willpower should break, and you threw those words of mine back in my face..."

"That's alright, Max," Liz said. "Past is the bygones. But today's a day where the present becomes the future, moreso than usual at least symbolically, and - and I don't want my future to be one where I'm estranged from you. I realize that we both have some issues to work through, and things that we're not crazy to be afraid of. But can the two of us take a little time, right now, to work through all that stuff together instead of angsting about them all by ourselves, and not really getting anywhere?"

"So let me put all of that in a slightly different context," I said boldly. "It's New Year's Eve, and you wish that things were enough better between us to kiss me at midnight tonight. Since that might take a lot more effort than showing up at eleven-thirty at night and trying to say a few of the right things, you want to spend the day working on fashioning a slightly better-looking bandaid solution."

"Some of that's right on target," Liz admitted. "I actually did entertain the notion of showing up in the middle of your parent's party, and when I didn't like the sort of imaginary outcomes I got from that, I decided to move it up and give us a bit more time - and work on my speeches a lot." She sighed, looking away from me out at the neighbor's flower garden. With Liz unable to track the focus of my eyes, it was impossible to resist taking a good look at her rear end in those jeans. "But I'm not sure that whatever was going on between us, it needs healing, Max. It's not perfect as it is, but I'm thinking more along the lines of building our relationship up, further and stronger, not repairing what was already there." She spun back around, and I instantly wrenched my stare away, before she caught me fixedly looking at her crotch. She might have wondered what was suddenly so fascinating about the porch eaves. "And if it does need healing, sometimes a bandaid is the right way for healing to start."

"Okay, Liz, your speeches are very good," I admitted. "I'm still worried and scared about if I can spend that much time with you, and not - not cross the line into territory that we shouldn't be covering." I was looking at Liz out of the corner of my eye as I said this, and saw her entire face fall when I said this. "But I think that this may be one of those situations where I'll need to compromise on my stubborn choices, if I don't want to burn my bridges with you later."

"I, umm, I wish that I could tell you that it didn't matter so much, that I wouldn't hold it against you, if you turned me away," Liz said slowly. "But I guess that wouldn't be true, no. This matters to me, and it would widen the chasm between us, if..."

"Okay, okay," I said, not really wanting to hear the end of that sentence. "Does New Year's Eve really have that much significance to you?"

"What can I say?" she said, shrugging uncomfortably. "I do realize that the tradition is something like superstition, but - but in our case, it's a useful catalyst, I think. The ultimate 'put up or shut up' moment, as it were, that can't be pushed backwards in time."

"So what next?"

"Umm - it's up to you, though I do have some notions if you don't have suggestions. My only two requirements are that whatever we do, we have to do it together - and that we don't spend time with parents or friends."

"You realize that I'm supposed to be spending the whole day helping my mother get ready for her New Year's Eve party, right?" I pointed out.

"Oh, no. Could we, umm... hmm." Liz pouted prettily. "We probably don't want to set the precedent of just skipping out on family and responsibilities without a word of explanation... unless it's an alien emergency and we don't have any other choices. Maybe I could talk to her?"

"Umm - let me try," I said, smiling a little bit. "Mom likes you, actually, and I think that she does want the two of us to work things out, not that she has any ideas what issues we've got. But..."

"But you're the one who knows what to say to her," Liz confirmed. "Alright. I'll wait out here, if you like."

"No, come on in, warm up a bit, and say hello to everybody. That could help."

Liz nodded agreement as I held the door open for her to walk through.

------------

It was easier than I thought to get formal dispensation from all of my party-related duties. After a bit of consideration, I decided to leave any mention of issues that Liz and I had to work through as an ace in the hole, starting with the explanation that she had a New Year's eve surprise for me, that might take all day, as far as I knew. I was more than a little surprised when Mom said that she wouldn't be one to stand in the way of a New Year's eve surprise, and that Liz had custody of me for the day, up until ten to midnight, at which point she wanted to see both of us back at the party.

The rest of the family had gathered to see what was up, and Dad took the whole thing fairly well, with a bit of a nostalgic twinkle in his eye that made me not want to know who he was remembering. On the other hand, Isabel seemed a bit miffed that I was getting out of my party chores - some of which would probably get dumped on her, I had to admit, I heard her mutter under her breath something about how she 'should have' something involving Alex and a call - not sure if she was saying that she should have called Alex or should have taken a call from Alex, but the overall effect is the same I guess. Liz must have caught part of it too, I think, because she shot Isabel a teasing, 'so there' kind of smile.

So soon Liz and I were back outside with the parental blessing for just about anything that might fall under the header of a New Year's surprise, and considerably more complicated feelings of our own about the day - at least I felt that way, and I thought that Liz was still struggling with the ramifications of her idea. "First thing, a relatively idle question," I said, looking around. "Just how did you get over here anyway?"

"Took the bus up from the downtown, no big deal," Liz replied. "Except that I had to wait longer than usual, because I didn't realize they were on a holiday schedule today. It still seems kinda weird that you live all the way across town from West Roswell."

"Ehh, well." I'd already given Liz the explanation for how my Dad had gotten us into what he considered the best school in the city, even if we weren't that close to its district, and I didn't really want to rehash that particular discussion. "Then I guess we're in the Jeep - again."

"Watch out for horses," she muttered, and that actually made me smile somewhat, but neither of us laughed.

"Yeah. And as much as it might be tempting certain kinds of fate, I kinduv think that going driving out in the desert is about as good a way to start as any, given your stipulations," I said, circling around the vehicle to open the front right door for her. "By the time we get well out of town, it'll be coming on lunchtime, so we can hit Blackie's - have you ever been there?"

"I don't think that I've ever heard of it," Liz admitted.

"Good enough, then I won't spoil your first impressions," I quipped. "And I've got another idea for an activity north of town, but that can wait until we're on our way." We both climbed up into our seats at about the same moment. "And I say this as a sort of a pre-New Year's resolution, which I hope you'll swear to as well and hold me to: We don't kiss until midnight, and we don't even kiss then if we haven't put in the effort and made a breakthrough."

"You drive a hard bargain, Mister Evans," Liz said, with that laugh that really drives me crazy with wanting to kiss her, so I gunned the ignition hard at just that moment to try and drown the sound out. Somehow it didn't help that much, and just seeing her laugh was hard on me in the same way, especially the way her ponytail bounced a little up and down. Why did she have to pick today to wear the ponytail?? "But yeah, that does sound like a good idea, and I'll - well, I'll do my best. Not sure I can make any promises."

Couldn't promise that she wouldn't kiss me, or couldn't promise that she'd stop me if I tried to kiss her? Neither mental image was helping, so I pulled out quickly and turned onto the main road. That seemed like the best kind of distraction that was going to offer at the moment.

"Okay, are you going to tell me about your second activity, or is it up to me to come up with some hard-working line of conversation?" Liz asked after a moment.

I considered, realizing that we were already a few blocks away from the house. "Alright, I'll tell you now. Do you remember how I told you about the pods that the three of us came out of, ten years ago?"

"Well, yeah," Liz agreed. "Not as if I'm likely to forget a detail like that."

"I thought the two of us might try to trace our way back to the pods. We've all tried and never been able to find our way - Michael's spent the most time on it, and Isabel probably the least. I think I had a dream about it recently, that might give me another clue."

"So you don't know where they were?" Liz confirmed. "I don't guess I realized that until you said that." She sighed. "I actually thought of asking you to take me there, but figured that there was a reason you hadn't volunteered."

"No, we remember a few things about what the 'where' was like," I explained, "but not how to actually find it - big desert, not many clues about the route that we took until we got to the point where Mom and Dad found us. Even our memories of emerging are far from clear... we can remember a little something about the space - dark and enclosed, like a cave, but I still feel like there's something that I'm missing about it."

"Well," Liz said, smiling. "I'd certainly be pleased to go pod cave hunting with you. And thank you for suggesting it." I shrugged slightly. After a moment, we both started speaking at the same time, and both stopped after a word or so. "You go ahead," she insisted.

"Umm, okay I suppose. I was just wanting to ask if you'd intentionally dressed to impress me today."

"What, these old things?" She chuckled to herself. "Umm, yeah kind of. The clothes were more Maria's idea, really, but I actually liked the notion of knocking your socks off a bit. She's still upset about Michael giving her the silent treatment, especially since the healing ritual."

"Oh. Well, I wish her the best of luck, but a part of me thinks that might be that she finds a way to get over my mostly indescribable best friend instead of expecting something different out of him."

"I'm not sure I'd believe that," Liz countered. "Yes, Michael has his own share of issues, and Maria does too - but I really do believe that people can change for the better. Has Michael ever really been - interested in a girl before? Ever let anybody in besides you and Isabel?"

"I'm not sure how much he lets us in," I said. "As far as Michael and girls - no, not really. We both went through the first wave of teenage hormones at the same time - and he had a crush on Pam Troy for a while, actually, except she blatantly refused to say a word to him..."

"Figures, the high and mighty bitch," Liz muttered under her breath.

"...and asked Stephanie Foster to hang out with him over at Hank's one time, which I think went slightly better, but he never tried again and didn't tell anybody why."

"Okay, that doesn't count," Liz insisted. "Somehow I can tell that Maria's the one. Before the two of them are through with each other, Michael will be a very different guy. Can't tell much other than that, but count on it."

"Okay, I guess we'll see," I said. "So did Maria have that plan of trying to dress up and seduce Michael, but chose not to go through with it and helped you do something a little bit similar?"

"Umm - not sure if what she was daydreaming about was seducing Michael, but maybe that's as good a way to put it as any," Liz agreed. "Have I seduced you?"

I took a deep breath and thought about that one. "Not yet. If you get me to kiss you early, then yes - but you've promised to try not to do that. Persuading me to come along doesn't quite count as a seduction I think."

"Aww, too bad." Liz laughed softly again. "Okay, new subject I guess, or something of a return to an older one. What were things like for you and Isabel after the Evans found you? After they adopted you?"

"That's two questions, really; I'm not sure if you realized that."

"Umm - well, I guess I did know that all of the paperwork couldn't have gone through instantly as soon as you got into their car... but we might as well start there, if there was anything interesting about that hiatus before you became their kids."

"Interesting?" I thought about that. "I'm not sure. We didn't go home with them straight away, though I think that Mom would have liked to take us and never let us go. But Dad insisted on reporting us to county social services, and they wanted to take us for medical examinations and see if they could find our parents quickly, or anything else about us."

"That makes sense," Liz agreed. "It was probably really scary for you, huh?"

"Ummm..." Part of me was agreeing with what Liz was saying, but it was something that I'd never admitted out loud, and so I went along with the impulse to shy away from saying so - at least not while I was concentrating some of my attention on driving. "Pass."

"Oh... okay." Liz considered. "Something a little less hard-hitting? I didn't mean to get into the really deep stuff right off after all, it just seemed like a promising cue."

"Yeah, that's okay," I said. "I - I didn't really understand a lot of what was going on, with people I mean, back then. None of us learned much English for the first two days or so." Liz nodded some kind of understanding. "It's kind of weird, actually - I was able to memorize the sounds, and understand sentences later that had completely confused me at the time."

"Alien brain development," Liz commented. "Has to be full of mysteries. Did they bring in anyone to see if they could reach you in another language? Thinking that you might have been raised to speak Spanish, or a native language, or French or something?"

"Yeah," I agreed softly. "Along with a therapist or something like that, trying to figure out if there was a trauma-related reason that we couldn't communicate in speech. In fact, when I've compared our memories of the different kind of experts we talked to against the old budget records for Chavez County services, it looks like they must have gotten quite a few people down from Albuquerque or Santa Fe."

"That's a bit scary, when you think about it," Liz commented softly. "I mean, these people examined you when you were at your most vulnerable, before you even understood that you were different I guess, never mind how important it was to blend in and keep the secret. Obviously it wasn't completely apparent to any of them at the time that you weren't - weren't of this Earth, or the Evanses would probably never have been able to adopt you." I nodded agreement to this - she wasn't saying anything that I hadn't thought about beforehand. "But any of them might remember something 'weird' that could turn into a clue for somebody looking for aliens - someone like Topolsky or the people who sent her."

"Yes, that's one of the things that I worry about," I admitted. "And one of the reasons that somebody I care about shouldn't be too close to me, maybe - that you might get hurt when the FBI comes after me next time."

"I don't agree with that reasoning," Liz insisted. "If I'm close to you, if I'm in your life, then I'm one more person who could help protect you, help you hide. I've been helpful already, going to River Dog the first time because you couldn't while Topolsky was watching - and helping Alex expose Topolsky for what she was. And since the shooting incident, I'm a material witness whether I'm your girlfriend or not, Max. Maybe if you're in my life, you can help protect yourself by protecting me."

"I suppose that's a point," I admitted. "Although we've all had one major exposure scare that wouldn't have been a thing if it weren't for you and your journal."

"Hey, I do *not* deserve further grief over that," Liz insisted. "It's been taken much better care of now, and besides, I told you that you don't need to worry about my - my friend having looked at it."

"Yes, you did tell me that," I said. "Haven't really explained it to my satisfaction, but oh well." By this time we were starting to leave Roswell on the North road. "New topic?"

"Return to the old one, moving forward," Liz countered. "So your Mom and Dad adopted you, after County Social had given you the once-over and failed to come up with any trace of your true parents."

"Yeah," I agreed, trying to find my place in that narrative. "I was so glad to see them again - somehow they made me feel like everything was alright - though they'd tried, nobody at Social Services had been able to do that. So we went home with them, and Mom had set up rooms for each of us by then, and everything fit so we that for a while I was reminded of the way it had been out in the desert, when Michael had been with Isabel and I, and I actually expected Mom to introduce him to us, or him to just pop out from a closet like he'd been hiding there all along."

"But you didn't actually meet him again until a lot later, right?" Liz asked. "Sorry, not meaning to interrupt the flow of the story, just trying to get things straight, You mentioned, when we were waiting for the others to drive Michael up to the reservation, how he'd stepped up onto that rock so you could see him, how he ran away when the car was stopping, and - and that Isabel cried about him."

I snickered - at myself, not at Liz. "You know, I might have shed a tear or two myself - especially after Izzie got me started. But yeah, it was nearly two years before we had any idea what had happened to that other little boy we remembered. We didn't know that he was 'Michael' then of course, even after we'd picked our own names out of the baby names book."

"Okay, and when did you next see him and find out that he was Michael?" Liz pressed.

"The first day of third grade, Isabel and I had agreed to meet at the schoolyard gate and walk home. This was before we were going to school across town, of course. I got there a bit late, because I was talking with Jack Barber about some club thing, and when I got outside, I saw her talking with this other boy. At first I didn't understand who he was, and then they moved around and I could recognize his face." I laughed a little. "None of us really talked about the fact that he was - was like us, or that we remembered each other. It was all sort of unspoken."

"Cool. How did Isabel run into him?"

"In the lunchroom. For the rest of that story, I think that you'll have to talk to one of them." Liz nodded. "Okay, umm - back to our early days at our house. I guess those first few weeks were when we really started to soak up English and speak it ourselves. Mom and Dad figured that meant that we'd really known it all along, and had either forgotten how or just not wanted to say much."

"Okay, one other possibly side-tracky question," Liz asked. "When did you really realize that something was different about you - that you were aliens and had powers and that kind of thing?"

"Oh boy." I sighed. "Not a simple question, it's the sort of thing that happened in stages, a dozen little times."

"Sorry."

"No, that's okay," I admitted. It was the sort of thing that - well, that if I was 'making an effort' with Liz, I did want her to understand, so I racked my brain trying to find a way to organize all of those memories. "Isabel and I each used our powers a couple times before even understanding that we were doing anything at all, and after that it was a bit tricky to say if we realized that they were things that - well, that grownups might not be able to do when we weren't looking." Liz giggled again. "I healed a bird with a broken wing, and Isabel, well, she thought that she was having a weird nightmare the first time she accidentally wandered into one of Dad's..." I only caught myself at that point. "Uh, whoops. Never mind. The point is, I guess we were nine by the time we really understood most of the headline news about ourselves. I actually looked at blood samples from all three of us under a microscope to clinch the evidence that we weren't human - much like you did with my cheek cells that day in class."

"Okay," Liz said. "But sorry, today, 'never mind' is not an option. I'm not going to let go of that reference. What power does Isabel have, that related to nightmares and wandering into something belonging to your Dad?" She paused, and leaned so close that her shoulder was brushing mine, and I could smell a hint of some fruity and flowery perfume. If her hair had been down, it would have been falling against my neck, but fortunately that was one trick that the ponytail couldn't match. "Tell me, Max," she whispered sweetly.

"It - um, it's not my secret to tell," I managed to choke out, and we both laughed at that.

"You should know that never works," Liz reminded me, sitting back in her seat again. "Okay, let's see how close I can get to working it out by myself. Nightmares. She thought that she was having a nightmare, so - not a power that she'd be using if she was really up and actively exploring in the daylight, I'd say. Something that she actually did when she was in bed, maybe? A power that's like a dream, or has to do with dreams? She has prophetic dreams, or something to do with dreams? No, that doesn't fit wandering, unless..."

She made a gesture like one hand clapping. (Don't ask me what sound it made.) "Can Isabel actually go into somebody else's dream? Is that - is that how she got the idea of vamping Alex at the soap factory rave party? She was concerned about what Alex might say to Valenti, she told me that, and said that she'd 'look into it.' I didn't have any clue what she meant by that at the time. She could have dropped into one of Alex's dreams, and it was a dirty one about her, or something like that... and so she thought that gave her the leverage that she needed."

"Yeah, actually that fits with what I know," I admitted, sighing. "I'm not sure of the details of the dream - Isabel wouldn't tell me, but she did 'dreamwalk' him. And, to be honest, I'm glad that Alex didn't rise to her bait so easily - not so much for his sake, though he's probably lucky to not be wrapped around Izzie's finger as tightly as she intended to get him. But it would have been cheap for Isabel too, to resort to a trick like that for all of our sake, when Alex was worthy of the truth - and you were the first to see that in him."

"Right, I'm glad that he knows now, though it was a bit weird the way he first reacted to the news," Liz agreed softly. Taking a silent hint, Max let the conversation lapse, as they drove off into the desert.

-----------

"So, what's Blackie's, anyway?" Liz asked after a little while, startling me out of a slightly prurient daydream. "I mean, I can sort of guess based on the name, but figured that I'd better get the real story."

I had to laugh at the question. "Whatever you were guessing, it's probably pretty close. It's a barbecue and grill restaurant near the 20 split on the highway - mostly drive-through, though I think that they do have a few picnic tables outside, mostly for warmer weather than this. The food isn't really overcooked, though that's kind of a running joke that they use for publicity - there's an oversize grill that's set up outside just to pour thick clouds of smoke into the sky that you can see for miles away, and a billboard with a cartoon of a Dad putting some crispy charcoaled burgers on a picnic table, while the rest of the family looks horrified."

"Huh, sounds kinda cool," Liz admitted. "I wonder why I haven't heard anything about it before. Just how far is this place from Roswell?"

"More than thirty miles, not sure," I admitted. "Which is quite a distance, I have to admit. Michael and I discovered it about a year and a half ago, when we first started exploring the desert looking for where we came from."

"Wait a minute," Liz immediately said. "Wouldn't you have both been on your learner's permits back then?"

"Ummm..." was all I had to say at first. "I was a very good driver, and Michael's foster dad had an old beat-up Chrysler that he really didn't care if we took out together." Pause. "Don't tell my parents."

"Of course I won't," Liz said, sounding a bit stiff and prim. "I'm just a little disappointed in retrospect. What would I have done if you'd gotten yourself killed before I'd even met you, Max Evans?" I couldn't come up with an answer to that. "Okay, okay, moving on. Blackie's sounds good for lunch - but since you picked the restaurant, I'm ordering for both of us. Sound fair?"

"Sure," I agreed without hesitation, wondering what Liz would pick to get me from a menu that would be initially unfamiliar to her. "We should probably park and go inside, then, instead of lining up for the drive-through. That sound alright?"

"Certainly," Liz agreed. "I could do with a stretch, it's been a long ride to get this far." Ooh, and there went my (recently far too hormone-drenched) imagination, just picturing the way Liz's hips would move in those tight jeans as she stre-etched. This no kissing until midnight deal is possibly doomed to last no later than 2 pm. "How far have we come so far?"

"Umm, maybe twenty miles," I said, looking around to see if I could spot any other nearby landmark.

Liz nodded acceptance of that. "So it'll be a while." I went uh-huh. "And after we grab lunch it's off hunting for a pod cave? Do you have any idea of approximately where that is? I mean - well, I guess you know the spot where your parents found you, right?"

"Yeah," I agreed. "Actually, that was pretty close to this stretch of highway, I'm pretty sure. Err, not actually on the main road, though - they were on one of the much smaller roads through the desert." I managed to catch something as it whizzed by. "Okay, we're at mile marker one twenty-nine, that's a bit further than I thought we were. We were found on a lane that meets up with the 285 between 127 and 128. Dad's never pinpointed the spot on that smaller road, but after some pestering he took Isabel and I down there and gave us a 'it was somewhere around here', and with Michael's help we were able to pinpoint the spot with some certainty."

"Umm, okay, back up for a second," Liz said. "Where does the numbering start, anyway?"

I chuckled. "At the spot where route 285 crosses from Texas into New Mexico, between Carlsbad and Pecos."

"Oh, right. And the location where we committed a felony."

"Heh? Did I miss that one?"

"When we were following Michael to Marathon," she explained. "Crossing a state line as minors, without parental permission."

"I'm not sure that's really a crime, in our case," I had to say. "For an adult to take minors across the state line, without their parent's permission, yeah, I think that there might be a case there. Since we're ALL under eighteen, I don't think the same one applies."

"Okay, well, never mind that," Liz agreed. "So, just to help map this system into my own little Roswell-centric world, what mile marker would the Crashdown be at?"

"Umm, I think somewhere around one hundred eight is the closest to downtown Roswell. Not sure if they actually have a marker for it, in the city, but that would be the equivalent."

"Alright," Liz said. "So, we have a location on a small road off the highway, and - well, I'm not sure, but it seems to me that as little kids, you couldn't have walked that far."

"Well, we thought so too," I said, and laughed, "when we first started looking. Between Michael and I, we pretty much combed all through the mile-radius circle around that spot, looking for anything that seemed familiar or at all like the cave that we remember leaving, and didn't have much luck." I sighed. "We didn't have any ideas about what direction to widen the search in until I was able to find out a bit more about the Roswell crash in forty-seven, and the original crash stories."

"Right, okay," Liz said. "I've picked up a lot of the mythology, so let me see what I can remember. The original reports of debris were made by William Brazel - he was the foreman on a ranch, north and west of town... but I can't put my tongue on the name of the place."

"Puhlman ranch," I told her, smiling. "It's nearly six miles from where we were found, which is definitely a long way to think of little kids travelling by themselves during the night, but I'm not sure that we couldn't have made it. An adult hiker can make three miles in an hour, and I kinduv think that we were a lot of hours travelling, most of the night."

"Okay," Liz said. "So have you and Michael explored much of the ranch and nearby territory?"

"Not that much, actually. There are still some people keeping an eye on that area, actually, and it would be suspicious if we were found or stopped near the Crash site. There was - well, there was a bit of a scare, and all three of us made pact that we wouldn't go back until we had a better notion of what we were looking for."

"Ooh, interesting phrasing," Liz immediately realized. "Did you actually pact that when you went back, you'd take Michael or Isabel?" I shook my head. "Do they realize that you didn't promise it? I mean, I still remember how much Michael freaked when he realized that you were holding the cave maps out on him - and now you're taking me pod cave hunting without letting him know that you've got a lead?"

"Well, I was going to mention it to them - after the party, tomorrow," I told her. "Didn't realize that I'd have any time to go looking today, until you showed up. Guess I thought that was sort of a sign. Of course, if you're really worried about what Michael will think, we don't have to go looking."

"No, hell are you kidding me? Of course I'm up for this. It's exciting to think that I might be here when you find the place you were - were born, or something like it." She laughed. "Michael will have to get used to the idea."

I smiled and drove off towards Blackie's.

-----------

So, lunch was great and made me see something completely familar in a totally new light - just like lots of other stuff with Liz has turned out, I have to admit. She picked the steak-on-a-bun sandwich for me, which I told her was one of the things that I always pondered trying and then never actually did order, choosing more familiar standbys instead. She gave me one of those 'See, I told you' stares at that point, which I have to admit is also particularly cute on Liz Parker. (Don't even ask me if she has any expressions that I don't find adorable. In way too deep...)

I didn't actually let her go through with the entire order exactly as she'd wanted for me, though, because she picked the sweet potato fries on the side, and I've never liked anything to do with sweet potatoes. I've never had them here, but I've had sweet potato fries and a number of other ways you can prepare them, often at parties that my mom has dragged the entire family to or special elaborate dinners that she tries to make all by herself, and usually ends up calling Dad or one of her friends to rescue the main course or the dessert. My mom is a huge sweet potato proponent herself, and seems to think that if she can only get clever enough about hiding them, I won't recognize the things and will realize that I really do like them. This is punctured by the fact that even when I don't recognize the tuber ahead of time, I never do actually like the taste. Actually, she caught me by surprise with sweet potato fries once, which is why they fall into a special loathing category along with all the other sweet potato dishes that I've eaten under false pretences.

So, anyway, after I got through about half of that speech, Liz changed her mind and gave me spicy curly fries, which aren't my favorite but pretty cool, especially for a special occasion like this. For herself, she got a Big Bad Sirloin burger, which is nearly half a pound of beef and looked like the patty was about an inch and a half thick, on a fairly skinny sourdough bun so that even Liz, who has a fairly small mouth, could bite without having to strain - and she paired that with the charcoal-grilled potatoes, and ordered large cherry cokes for both of us.

We chatted about Maria and Isabel, and school and my new job at the UFO center -- well, I've had it for over two months now, but it's still new in comparison to the rest of my life, and Liz's gig at the Crashdown that she's been at for years really -- while having our lunches at one of the picnic tables - most of them were empty on a December day like this. Despite keeping up her end of the conversation, Liz made quick inroads on everything, and I still had nearly half my fries left and a bit of steak and bun when she was done her potatoes and her Big Bad. (We both still had some of our drinks left at this point, not that that really matters.) I popped the last bit of sandwich into my mouth, enjoying the texture of the meat and the way the flavor of the mushroom sauce mixed with everything else, and after several seconds of vigorous chewing, swallowed in satisfaction.

"Okay, do you want to head back onto the road?" I asked. "I can wrap the fries back up, and snack on them later." Bam - instant puppy-dog eyes from Liz, and I was melting before I even figured out what she was getting at. "Umm, err, that is, we can both snack, I suppose." That got me a grin, and I figured that Liz was probably going to be doing most of the snacking, especially since she would so-generously offer to hold the wrapped curlies while I drove away.

Once we were settled in the Jeep and away, though, something else distracted both of us from the fries, and in fact I think that they slipped away from Liz's lap and ended up in a lump under the seat, the wrapping just starting to come apart. "Max, did you notice the well-dressed guy in blue, with sandy blond hair, who was all by himself at one of the picnic tables?"

"Umm - yes, I guess so," I said, starting to get a bad feeling. "I didn't pay particular attention to him, why?" Liz didn't answer immediately, and I thought of something to add. "I know that the people who were working with Topolsky back when she was spying on us tended to wear blue suits, but that doesn't mean that anybody in that sort of outfit is - well, you know. We haven't seen any sign of that kind of person since she left."

"Yeah, and maybe I'm jumping to conclusions," Liz said, starting to sound just a bit testy, "but as we were settling in to the car, he got up and left part of a burger at his table. I noticed that, but didn't think anything particular about it - until now, when I notice that there's a car that left the Blackie's parking lot following us back towards town, and it might be the man in blue driving."

"How big of a 'might' is that?" I asked, feeling a bit upset myself. The part that was the most upsetting, actually, was that I didn't seem to have enough information to decide if I should actually be worried that we were being followed by a mysterious person, or slightly aggravated at Liz that she was acting too paranoid, or more calmly in-between somewhere. "More than half of the cars that leave Blackie's would head back south, I tend to think, between travellers stopping off on a bite who were coming from further north, and people who only went out this far for the food. You didn't see the guy approach a car?"

"He was walking towards somewhere where there were cars, but I didn't see him step right up to one, no," Liz shot back. "You asked me something about grandmothers, and I was thinking about my answer. But it wouldn't have been the other party at the picnic table next to us, and I don't think anybody was in the drive-through lane just as we were getting up."

"Hmm." Somewhat reluctantly, I decided that it was necessary to treat this guy as an FBI agent until he was demonstrated to be something else, or until it didn't matter one way or another. "Okay, so if he's tailing us, then I don't think I want to turn down the right desert road while he's there. Does that mean we should just go back into town, and see if he's still with us wherever we stop?"

"Umm - no," Liz suggested. "Take an earlier turning first - see if he comes after us. Maybe it's all just a coincidence."

I nodded, accepting the idea, and slowed down somewhat so that when a turning came up, we'd be ready. The dark burgundy-ish sedan in the rear view also went down to a crawl after a moment, which seemed to support the idea that the driver was in 'tailing mode' and didn't want to approach us too closely. Soon enough, there was an opportunity to leave the highway to the right, a fairly straight gravel lane, and I took it. We waited, both holding our breath for long seconds at a time, until the sedan reached the turning - and followed us onto it.

"Okay, we've got a serious problem," Liz muttered. "What now? Can we go around in a loop and pass Blackie's again? He can probably stay behind us the whole way there, but if the point is to tail you, he probably won't do anything more threatening. In point of fact, if he realizes that we know he's there behind us, he might just give up and go back to home base, wherever that is - kind of like Topoksly did."

"Nice idea, but there's a problem with it," I told her. "You can't do loops without cross roads, and there aren't any cross roads out here in the desert - just little roads like this coming out from the main highway at intervals. We wouldn't be able to cross to another side road until we get to the county line at least - not on a road, at least, and though the Jeep is good at offroading, I wouldn't want to take it off the road for that long."

"Oh, boy," Liz muttered. "And we can't turn around and go back to the 285, can we?"

"Hmm - just let me think about that one a minute," I grumbled, still keeping an eye on the sedan in the mirror.

TO BE CONTINUED...

[Chrisken]

Thanks for the positive feedback all, and I'm happy to be back so soon with a nice long update.
Most of the text of the diary entries is taken from the scripts for the Pilot, Leaving Normal, and Blood Brothers, and I'm not claiming any rights over those words for obvious reasons.

Part Two

"It makes no sense that these so-called 'roads' are just barely one lane wide anyway," Liz grumbled, peering back at the sedan following us, which just might have an FBI officer in it following us. "If we came upon a car coming the other way, everybody would get stuck."

"Most vehicles that leave the main highway going into the desert can off-road, at least a little," I pointed out. "And the desert floor right near the road is pretty flat and even, almost as good as a paved shoulder really. As long as at least one vehicle can drive off the gravel, then they'd both be okay."

"Alright," Liz admitted, and there was some silence for a few moments. "Why are you slowing down, Max?"

"Well, I want him to not be lurking quite so far away from us, and this seemed to be the easiest way of forcing the issue," I commented. "If he's either innocent or pretending to be, then he should stop hanging back and start to crowd us if I go slow enough."

"Okay, yeah, if that's what you were going for, then it's working," she reported, a bit dubiously. "What next?"

I smiled a bit to myself, enjoying what would be coming up next. "That car of his, I wouldn't say that it would be much good at going off the road, would you?"

"Umm, no, actually," Liz admitted. "He could probably just managed to get off the lane to let somebody else pass if he had to, nothing more adventurous. Why do you ask?"

"Just hoping that you'd realize the beauty of this as I'm doing it," I bragged, and steered to the left, taking the Jeep off the gravel lane and onto the flat dusty ground, turning in a medium-size arc, neither as tight as the Jeep could manage if really pushed to it nor as wide as I might try if I had all the concrete in the world to circle around in. Just after passing the point where we were parallel to the road, I straightened out the steering wheel, and for a moment we were pointed straight at the sedan, but of course it was moving at a different vector, so there was no risk of a collision.

Liz giggled with appreciation as I climbed our vehicle back onto the road - now we were behind the other guy and he was behind us, (in our own respective orientations,) and each driving further away from the other. But we were pointed back towards route 285, and him further out into the boonies. There was no way that the guy, (if it really was the guy that Liz had spotted, or any kind of guy,) could stop us from getting back to the main road, and he'd probably have to do a lot of fancy maneuvering just to turn around in time to keep us well in sight - and that would be completely obvious what he was up to, then. Of course, what we had done made it reasonably obvious that we knew we were being followed and were trying to shake pursuit, but that didn't mean that they would be smart to make it even more blatant trying to keep up. I admit that I don't really know how an FBI alien hunter would think that well, but it seems that if you know that your target sees you coming, it would be better to back off and try from another direction, or another day. Like Topolsky did, actually, in a way - as soon as Alex and Liz really knew anything about who she really was and what she was really doing in Roswell, BAM she was gone so fast that she nearly left burnt rubber, no tying up loose ends, no explanations, and no sign of her since. To me, that made sense, and worried me a little, in that it made it obvious that the people who were giving agents like Topolsky instructions weren't at all stupid.

"Okay, so," I said after a moment, turning toward Liz - and realized that was craned around so far to peer behind us that her butt was sticking up into the air above her seat. (A surge of hormones flooded through me, again, at that sight which I hadn't been at all prepared for at that moment.) "Ooh, guess I don't need to tell you to look closely and see what he's doing."

"Yeah, nothing much, just driving away," she reported, and then, as the highway was drawing close, "Okay, I think that he's trying to do a three-point turn and look like he just figured out this is the wrong road or something. He might have been trying to time it for when he was nearly out of our sight."

"Yeah, but that works both ways," I said, pressing just a bit harder on the gas. "We're nearly out of view from him as well, and if he doesn't realize that we've sped up while he's still turning around, in time..."

"Then he won't know where to find us," Liz said, returning her rear end to the bucket seat as the car started to shake back and forth slightly, and grinning back at me. "I like it. Let's make tracks."

-----------

"Alright, still no sign of anybody," Liz reported, having checked just as we were passing out of sight of the highway again - this time on the RIGHT desert side road. This one was wider, and roughly paved instead of gravel, but still had the same impression that would keep anybody from just heading down it for a casual joyride - unless they had unusual tastes in joy, that is.

"Okay, then I guess we can go back to the 'getting to know each other better' stuff for a little while," I decided. There hadn't been much conversation between us during the stretch of time that I just skipped over, just a lot of nervous watching the road behind us. Whoever the guy in the sedan was, we seemed to have gotten rid of him, (or her,) without attracting attention from a different side. "Let's see, what was your toughest decision you've made in your life - up until that moment in the cafe, let's say, and why?"

Liz immediately burst out laughing. "Sorry, sorry, it's just - except for your little special requirement, that sounds so much like the kind of a question I expect to get for college applications... or a bit like the ones on... do you remember the journalism assignment that we had, the day that Michael went off to Marathon in Maria's car, and took her with him?"

"Well, yeah, I think most of the things about that day are pretty firmly locked in my memory," I admitted. "Including having to deal with Kyle Valenti as my partner for that torture exercise. I can't decide which was worse, having to answer his questions, or listening to his answers... no, I take that back. Answering was harder."

"Yeah, I can appreciate that it was tricky, under the situation," Liz admitted softly. "Dealing with Isabel wasn't that much fun either, and I gather that Michael and Maria used that questionnaire, among other handy things, to drive each other crazy." She sighed. "Should I take this opportunity for even hanging out with Kyle for as long as I did? He's going to cause more trouble, I'm sure of that."

"No, come on, that's not necessary," I insisted, wanting to keep a lid on this line of thought, especially because there were still times when I thought that Kyle would be a better match for Liz than me in the long run - though we were hardly her only options when it came to that. "You thought you liked him, you broke up with him when you realized that it was right, and you don't owe me any apologies, or any other explanations other than that."

"Umm, okay," Liz said, sounding a bit puzzled by the intensity of my response - well, I could understand her confusion. "Let's see, umm - oh, I guess I didn't mention this to you already. I was chatting with Mister Sommers on the last day of class before Christmas vacation - you know, after he'd handed out the grades and was letting people come and see him if we had any problems. I just thanked him and mentioned that I'd been worried that the assignment would hurt my average, because I only got a B-minus on the paper I turned in. He was mentioning that he hadn't actually given much weight to that exercise in the final reckoning, and then - you'll never guess who he told me had helped him organize the assignment and the partners?"

"Let me try," I told her. "Kathleen Topolsky, neighborhood guidance counselor, FBI undercover agent..."

"...And big fat liar, as Maria said when we found her number in that other guy's motel room," Liz finished "Yep."

"Sorry that I stole your thunder," I said.

"Nah, that's okay. Did you know before I even brought it up?"

"Not really - I'd had an outside suspicion. It fit the pattern. As you might imagine, since you told me what you saw on her computer screen, I've made a bit of an effort to reconstruct what Topolsky'd been doing since she got to town and arrived at the school - to figure out what she might be able to report about us. There were quite a few clues staring us in the face."

"Like how she went into full investigation mode on Michael as soon as she arrived," Liz put in. "I was so sure at the time that was glaringly suspicious..."

"But the job posting she'd been given as guidance counselor gave her an alibi," I said. "We all swallowed it, especially since I can understand how a real guidance counselor might be worried about him. I was also thinking of those in-depth interviews she gave everybody for career preparation week."

"Ooh, yeah," Liz said, groaning. "I - well, I was trying not to give anything away about you, especially since it was only a few weeks after I'd found out, but - if she had any real psych training, she probably figured out a few interesting things from me there."

"Not more than I gave away, I'm pretty sure," I told her seriously. "When she did the picture exercise with the playground full of kids, she actually managed to draw me out a little about - well, about how lonely I feel at school most of the time. Doesn't take too much to make the leap from lonesome to..." I faltered, not sure of the right word.

"Alienated?" Liz offered, and I couldn't resist a round of chuckles.

"Okay, now that we've taken a side trip down memory lane, do you have an answer to the original question or not?" I pressed.

"Hmm... what was it again?" Liz asked, and I was about to repeat it when she found that in her memory again. "Toughest decision before I really met you?"

"Yeah, I guess that's what it comes down to," I said.

"Hmm again... a tougher inquiry than it looks," Liz insisted. "I really do think that my life was very sheltered before that day, and I didn't have that many difficult questions put to me." I nodded soberly, hoping to prompt her to come up with something interesting through silence. "I suppose if anything, it would have been the whole mess with cousin Rose, two years ago."

"I didn't - well, I didn't know that you had any cousins," I said. "Nobody's ever mentioned them."

"I'm not surprised," Liz said, and took a deep breath. "Alex and Maria know, of course, but they know that it gets me a bit - well, worked up even to hear her name, so they generally don't mention it. Kind of an awkward subject anyway. Rose is my only first cousin - on Mom's side, Rosa Ortecho. Her father uncle Steve, is half Mexican and half native American, and I suppose that Rose looks a bit like I would if I had those elements in my ancestry too."

"She must be pretty in an exotic way," I said without thinking about it. "Not that I'm complaining about your girl-next-door kind of beauty, of course."

"Heaven forfend," Liz said. But the exchange seemed to have kept her from getting too deeply into whatever upset her about having to mention cousin Rose. I was tempted to call the question off, to save Liz any kind of distress, but maybe if it was a tough question it really would help me understand her more and bring the two of us closer together. We'd agreed that today was a day to work on our relationship, and Liz should understand that that wasn't always easy. I'd get into some tough answers myself - as soon as I wasn't behind the wheel, which seemed like a reasonable excuse.

"Rose and I weren't that close - her family live several hours away, up just on the other side of Santa Fe from here, but whenever we visited, we always had the best fun," Liz continued. "She's two years older than I am, and I nearly idolized her. The last time they came - well, I guess that she was around the same age that I am now, and I was fourteen." Liz took a deep breath. "That's the time that she brought out some white stuff and a needle and asked if I wanted to learn how to shoot up."

"Oh, god." I nearly swerved off the rough road. "I - how did you react, you didn't..."

"No, come on, girl scout like me? I'd heard too many stories about the evils of drugs, and I couldn't loosen up enough to ignore them completely. I told her no thanks, and for a while things got ugly enough that I thought she was going to insist on sneaking out so she could do it alone. If she had, things might have been - but I persuaded her that it was okay, that I didn't mind if she did it while we hung out together."

"Uh-oh," I muttered. "So what happened?"

"Umm - nothing right away," Liz said after a long moment. "Rose got high, we talked and watched some videos that I had around, and she found them outrageously funny." She sighed. "But - well, I guess that I saw enough to worry me, that it wasn't all harmless fun, that something nasty had ahold of the Rose that I knew. And so, after wrestling with it, I took action before it was too late, the only way that I knew how." Another slightly ominous silence. "I betrayed her trust, told my parents and hers about what I'd seen and what she'd told me."

"Aunt Elaine said that she'd known that Rose had fallen in with a crowd that she was worried about, but none of them had any idea that the drug stuff was that bad," Liz continued after a moment. "They took her away, while she was still under the influence, and found a public drug treatment facility that would take her within a few days. And since that day, I've been dead to Rose Ortecho. She never forgave me for what I did."

"Oh," I said, not at all sure what to think of all of this. To think that Liz had broken the code of silence imposed on her by one of the people that she loved most in the world at that time, and she had this big huge secret about me and the people that *I* loved. But she had spoken up about Rose for her own good, because she was worried about her dear cousin, and in a way, Liz had done that already, and my world hadn't come crashing down yet.

She had told the truth to Alex, in Valenti's jail, because Alex had known too much already and not understood enough about why Liz was keeping the secret. At that same moment, (or nearly,) Isabel had been making the case to me that Alex was dependable enough to be told, as we watched the Sheriff's station from the far side of the parking lot. I guess that they had both been proved out.

And Maria - Liz had been the one to tell her, too, and though I wasn't sure yet if that would save us from some danger, Maria had proved that she wasn't out to ruin our lives. She'd had the chance to tell Valenti too, been pressured to it by the lawman, and she had stood firm. (Or lied like a rug, which amounted to the same thing in this case, if you ask me.)

"But how's Rose doing now?" I asked, and trying to prepare myself not to judge Liz on the outcome of the rehab.

"Pretty well, as far as Aunt Elaine and Uncle Steve know," Liz said with a smile. "She's in Narcotics Anonymous, and seems to be sticking with her program, but still bitter towards them too. She's moved out, into Santa Fe, and is working at a restaurant there."

"Waitressing work runs in the family?" I asked lightly.

"Nah, she's just a hostess," Liz shot back. "So, is that enough? Did I answer the whole question?"

"Yeah, more than," I agreed. "I wouldn't say that any of that qualifies as 'sheltered' either. That was a hard decision, and you made the right call."

"Yeah, I keep telling myself that when I think of it," Liz agreed. "That if it hadn't been for my warning, Rose might be a crack-whore by now, or dead of an overdose or whatever." She sighed. "But I guess I'm bitter too, that things couldn't go back to the way that they used to be between us, that I had to give up my relationship with my cousin to save her from the evils of drugs. Maybe - maybe if I'd been more patient, more convincing, I could have..."

"May motherships in the skies above protect us from the 'maybe I could haves,'" I intoned, and Liz broke up laughing.

"I guess that you're right. I took action when I saw the need, and I did the surest thing that I could think of," Liz agreed. "I don't have anything to apologize for over that - not to Rose and not to myself." She looked around. "So, how much further to the spot where your parents found you guys?"

I looked around myself, and groaned. "I think I was so busy listening to your story that we passed it. Hang on, guess it's U-turn time - again."

She laughed merrily as I slowed down and got ready to turn on the wheel.

------------

"Okay, I'm pretty sure that our route lies over thataway," I said, pointing over towards a nearby hill that looked a little bit like a giant crawling turtle - as good a landmark as any to remember to find my way around in a place like that. (Especially handy because the turtle resemblance more or less stuck with me no matter what vantage I looked at the rocks from.) "Anything to say before we start hiking?"

"Umm, yeah, a few," Liz admitted, looking around where we had parked. "So, is this where you guys were found?"

"No, I didn't think that we had time to retrace all that route," I pointed out. "Nearly six miles, remember?"

"Right, I - well, I admit I was thinking of that," she admitted.

"We turned off the road that we were picked up from and down an even - well, I won't even call it a trail, sort of a rough track through the desert," I added, to recap. "Thought about pointing out the spot as we passed it, but I guess I was on a roll with the story about Isabel and Malamud Johnson."

"And this particular spot on the track was picked how exactly?" Liz asked. "I don't think it's the end of the line, though it does seem to turn left up ahead and go along the edge of that little escarpment. Is this the closest we can get the Jeep to somewhere?"

"That's it exactly," I said, getting out. I tried to get around to the other side of the Jeep in time to open Liz's door for her, but she was having none of the little chivalries today, and met me on her feet.

"Well, start talking about where and how you figured this much out," she explained. "I don't want to just be along on this trip for company and conversation, I need to help you figure out your way if I possibly can, but I can't do that if I don't know how much you've already worked through."

"Isn't there something to be said for coming from the problem from a completely fresh perspective?" I asked.

"Not enough, really. Ignorance is no substitute for critical judgment, and you can be sure that I'll be thinking very critically about your methodology, and pointing out anything that I think is fallacious."

"Oh, boy," I muttered. "Okay, well - it's not like I had a completely logical and rational methodology for most of what I've been doing, I'll admit that much. Just trying to sort through the memories and impressions I've been able to gather about that first long hike, and plotting them against maps - my own maps that I've made of this part of the desert, and other ones that I was able to find online. You can look through my work if you like, and see if it makes any sense to you." I opened up the right door into the back of the Jeep. "In fact, since we came out here without much preparation aside from grabbing lunch beforehand, it probably makes sense to search the Jeep for any supplies and tools that might possibly be useful." It only took a few seconds to find the Velcro binder with my desert maps in it and hand it to her.

"Yeah, I guess that we did charge off with precious little planning, or at least I did," Liz admitted. "That's not terribly like me - but then, I guess I'd gathered up so much nerve and chutzpah into just going to your house and talking to you that I wasn't really thinking clearly about anything else. Umm - we should have brought snacks and drinks that we can carry along..." I gathered some junk food into an old backpack from the floor of the back seat. "Umm - and a compass and a flashlight, in case we actually do find some likely caves and need to see inside them." Both of those I was also able to produce. "And of course a blanket."

"Can't actually help you there," I said. "But what do we really need a blanket for, anyway? We're not staying out all night, and we're definitely not supposed to be sneaking off somewhere and kissing, right?"

"Well, no - and you've caught me, I guess that was what I was thinking of, you're right. Bad Liz - going against the pact." She playfully slapped at the back of her own left hand - and somehow I found that titilatting. (I can't even explain that to myself.) "Anything else in there that looks useful?"

"Hmm... tire iron, probably not, unless we're terribly worried about evil aliens or armadillos attacking us?" Looked at Liz, who shook her head, dark hair flying everywhere. "Ponchos - when does it actually rain around Roswell anyway? And - oooh, a camera. Might be good to immortalize our search, huh?"

"Definitely," Liz said, taking the small handheld from me and tucking it into her purse after looking at the controls. "Only 9 shots left on that roll of film - and we'd better save most of them to document the podcave when we find it."

"Definitely," I agreed, shrugging the knapsack on. "Okay, next step, turtle hill."

"Huh?" Liz turned and saw me pointing. "Why do you call it a turtle hill? I don't see the resemblance."

I blinked, and led the way a bit off to the side, hoping that she'd see the turtle from a slightly different angle.

-------------

"Okay, okay, yeah, I can get the resemblance," Liz said, just as we were leaving Turtle hill behind, and I wondered for a moment if she were just saying it to make me feel better or if her perspective had really snapped in from this unlikely vantage. Then I let those worries go for now.

"Alright, so - there was something that you were asking me just as we were leaving town, and I deferred basically because I was driving the car," I reminded her. "Can't remember quite what it was - can you?"

"Uhh - yes, I can, but I don't want to bring it up again just right now," she said. "We can deliberately go into something that's kinduv traumatic like that later, but - oh, I guess I'm just not just for the angstiness right now. Is - well, it sounds weird to ask, but is that okay?"

"Sure," I told her. "But only if you come up with something else to ask me about."

"Hmm." Liz considered that one as we walked down a fairly flat and solid stretch among the rough rocks that was just wide and straight enough to be used as a footpath, though I wasn't sure if anybody else had used it for that before I came along. "What do you want to learn most, about your alien side?"

"Huh." That question took me a long time, and eventually what I got first was a clarification that I had to ask for in return instead of an answer. "Do you mean as in, what questions do I want to get the answers to, no matter what they are, or what answers do I hope most are true?"

"Ohh, yeah, I guess there's that to consider," Liz admitted. "A lot of questions that you're not even sure if you'd want to ask, because the answers could be good or bad." She sighed. "Okay, questions, but - the questions that you're most curious about, leaving aside, as much as you can, the fears about what the answers might me."

"There's so much that I can't help BUT be curious of," I said, the words nearly pouring out of me with no space between them. "What's life really like back home for - well, for our parents, or whoever they were who came aboard that ship so long ago? I - I guess that 'where' their home was isn't big on the list, just because it's likely to be not something that has much meaning in my experiences, but - but I do wonder if the 'where' is even a planet anything like Earth."

"I guess I always assumed that," Liz said. "What other possibilities are you thinking of?"

"Well, it sounds a bit geeky to be listing them off, but - maybe just spaceships, travelling through the galaxy and never really stopping anywhere for long. Or domed cities on an airless moon, hollowed-out asteroid settlements, artificial rings that look exactly like the surface of a planet except that the horizon curves up because you're inside..."

"Oh, like the Ringworld?" Liz said. "I read that for a book report last year. It was alright - a few things that I didn't expect, but generally..."

"Umm - actually, I was meaning smaller, but I suppose even something as big and improbable as the Ringworld is possible," I agreed, wondering if the parts Liz 'hadn't expected' were the sex scenes in the book. "But we're getting away from your original question, so I'll move on to another answer. The other thing that I guess I'm really curious about is WHY aliens came to Earth after all - were they looking for something particular? Was it just an accidental landing that they hadn't even meant?"

"Could be neither," Liz pointed out. "Just having a look around every planet in this - this sector of space, or something like that, and it was Earth's turn."

"That could be it too," I agreed. "Like an interstellar survey mission or something."

"How about what other aliens - ones who weren't born here on Earth - what they're like?" Liz asked a bit more quietly. "Are you curious about that too?"

"I - I guess so," I said softly. "I'm scared enough, really seriously scared of serious consequences from finding out, that it reduces the curiosity factor a lot."

"Because of the stories we heard about - about Nasedo?" Liz asked.

"Well, yeah. Not just from River Dog, either - though hearing how an alien turned on Atherton and killed him was definitely a bit chilling. And there's Valenti's collection of photos of dead bodies with alien silver handprints on them. Any way you look at it, there's an alien murderer out there."

"Ugh, yeah, but do remember that we don't know the alien's side of it," Liz admitted. "He's dangerous, I'll admit that, but consider that he's been stranded on an unfamiliar planet, and may have had people like Topolsky and the ones that she worked for hunting him - for decades. For all that we know, some of the people Nasedo killed could have been trying to kill or capture him, or expose his existence to people who WOULD come after him if they knew that there was an alien around." She sighed. "And although this is much more of a dark grey area, he might have been driven to the murder and robbery of innocents just to stay alive and one step ahead of the FBI. That's a horrible thing, I know, but - I don't know, I wonder how I'd deal if I were in his situation."

"If I were in his situation, I might well hate all human beings just for being human, and want to see the lot of them dead," I muttered quietly. "That's something I can relate to, but not excuse or condone. If that's what he's come to, then..." I took a deep breath. "Then it's better for everybody that Nasedo should die, instead of more innocent people who just happen to get in his way."

"Okay." Liz took a deep breath. "But promise me, if you find out about some new alien, that you'll take the time to find out the truth before you react, alright Max?"

"Of course," I assured her. "People like Valenti have been jumping to enough conclusions about evil aliens, I don't want to ever do that myself."

Liz nodded, and we walked along in silence for a while.

-----------

"Okay, I think that this is the furthest in this direction that Michael and I have ever been," I pointed out to Liz. "We're technically on the Puhlman property, so be careful. I - I think from what I can remember of that dream, or repressed memory or what have you, I more or less know which way to head from here, but... don't laugh, okay?"

"At what?" Liz asked. I shot her a serious look. "Okay, do you want me to promise, cross my heart and hope to die?" She even ran a finger in two diagonal lines down the front of her sweater - which only emphasized the bumps on the taut finger. I didn't answer out loud, just got down on my knees to look around - and then tried sitting and craning my neck. "What the heck are you - ohh, trying to get the same perspective on things about you that you had when you were just a little boy?"

"Yeah, that's the idea," I agreed. I wasn't entirely satisfied with the results of the activity, but it did seem to reinforce the sense of what direction I'd have 'come' to this spot from, so I got up and led the way. "We've never actually done that before. Maybe it'll help somewhat."

Liz was by my side quicker than I'd have expected, reaching out to take my hand. I got a sensation like an electrical shock from her hand touching me, only not quite. It wasn't a full flash with visual or sound information, more like an awareness of how Liz's body felt, the same way that she felt it herself at this moment. Not as clear, which was good, as it would have been confusing for me and probably embarassing for both of us if I'd felt - the sensations of having anatomy that isn't actually part of my own body, but something of a revelation nonetheless. My own skin started to flush hot and I could feel my pulse beating more quickly, not in direct sympathy with the reactions that Liz was having herself, but out of realization of what it meant that she was feeling something that could induce such physical feelings. Of course, I'd already been experiencing something of the same sort being around Liz, but I guess I hadn't realized until just now that we were on a two-way street.

"Why do I matter to you so much, Liz?" I blurted out. Maybe it was a good question to ask, considering what we were supposed to be working our way towards today, or maybe my timing was way too soon. I hadn't really stopped to think about that before asking the question, and now had to soldier on. "Why does it make a difference to you if we kiss tonight, or never again in our whole lives? I - I know that it's a bit of an unfair question to ask, but if you can come up with an answer, it might help."

"I should be able to answer it, so I don't think that it's so unfair," Liz answered slowly. "I could turn it around on you, but though I know that you - you want to kiss me, you're the one who said that we shouldn't, so you're not the one who has to explain it." I was wondering if she would come back and ask me why I didn't think I was ready to kiss her yet, but I definitely wasn't ready to come up with an answer to that yet. As it happens, she didn't right then. "I'm the one who pushed the issue, so it's only fair that I should have to..." She trailed off on that phrase, probably deep in thought.

"You - meeting you was like nothing that's ever happened to me before in my life, Max," she finally said. "I feel this resonance with you, ever since you looked into my soul and showed me a glimpse of yours, and I don't want our lives to ever drift apart, no matter what we are to each other, whether that's true loves or maybe just friends or whatever. But you're also - well, you're ridiculously handsome in a kind of soulful, brooding, just slightly dangerous way that drives my hormones crazy even more than just being sixteen was doing to start with, and I only need to look at your face for my lips to start to pucker up as if they're already getting ready to kiss anything at all. Maybe - maybe that isn't the best reason in the world for us to be dating but I think it's a pretty good place to start, in the absence of a reason that we shouldn't." She took a deep breath.

"And I refuse to believe that the fact that you're an alien and I'm human is a good reason for us not to get involved, if only just because I care about you and know that you don't know any other alien girls other than your sister, so by that logic it's hard for you to have a love life - or a love life that's not squicky. Except for - well, never mind that, because I know that you *do* like girls, and without meaning to sound full of myself, I'm pretty sure that I get your motor running with plenty of RPM. Do we really need to make it any more complicated than that?"

"Umm... I'm not sure, I guess we'll have to figure that out before midnight," I said, trying to judge the position of the sun in the sky. We'd made pretty good time out this far, but would probably both have to rest more frequently on our walk back towards the car, and it'd at least be approaching sunset by then. A lot of the snack foods were already gone, and I'd probably be ravenously hungry by the time we got back to town - so dinner, somewhere on the north side that wouldn't be too busy on New Year's eve, and no hurrying back to the party. That sounded good. I hoped that we'd have some luck on the search before we had to head back, and sped up my pace just slightly. "Overall, though, I have to say that that's a pretty good reason - and it got my motor running faster just to hear it."

"Really?" Liz asked, pleased, running her fingers over mine. "Okay, diving into the deep end quickly - do you still want to read stuff from my journal about you? I - I have it here with me, in my purse, and I guess that now is the time, if ever. If I have to explain to you why I feel that we should be together, then maybe what I've written to myself as I try to sort out and process those feelings will be more persuasive than what I can manage to say extemporaneously with you right here in front of me."

I only really hesitated for a fraction of a second. "Yes, certainly, if that's okay with you, then I'd be interested in reading whatever parts of it you show to me." Pause. "And if this isn't too weird, I'd like a page of my own to write in."

That stopped Liz in her tracks. "Really? Why? I guess I never expected you to ask that."

"Well, I don't know," I said. "When I first thought of it, I just wanted to try - working out what I was feeling by writing it down, like you were talking about. But - but I wouldn't need to be in your journal to do that, just to have paper." I stepped around so that I was facing her, and dared to reach out with my free hand and stroke her cheek. "Maybe the truth is that I want to share this most private part of you in both obvious ways - not just reading your own thoughts, but commiting mine into your book forever."

That was definitely the right thing to say if I'd wanted, (or needed,) to win Liz over any further. "Okay, well - writing especially could be tricky while walking, so..." She looked around. "Why don't we keep on until we get to that rocky shelf thing, and take a break there?"

I turned to look where she'd pointed, and nodded my agreement. It was the perfect place, a stone formation that looked like it had been built as a two foot high riser next to the pathway, almost completely flat on top. So I walked over with Liz, hand in hand, and we sat on the shelf with our feet hanging down and not touching the ground. I took the knapsack off as Liz fished in her purse for the journal and a pen. "Do you always carry it around with you?" I asked.

"No, but quite often - I do feel safer when I know where it is, though I guess that's not perfect - but it's probably as safe as I am," she said, flipping through the pages. "Okay, here's the first one that I thought of. I - I hope that it's okay if I say I'd still prefer that you don't go riffling about on your own?"

I thought about that for a moment. It was still very slightly galling that Liz was only opening up this diary to me on her own terms - but I could understand if she had parts that she didn't want me to see, particularly if she was working through (understandable) fears about my alien side. And the whole point was that she was trying to get me to understand her well enough to change my mind about the two of us being a couple, so she'd certainly pick passages that were intense and revealing. I decided not to make an issue of it, but something else occured to me as she handed the journal over. "Alright, but I guess I didn't remember just how small these pages are. I want a double for my own."

"Of course, Max," she assured me. "It's a deal."

So I started reading the entry that she'd indicated - it was September twenty-first, and Liz started off the page by describing how I'd come to the Crashdown to talk with her, and had 'probably deliberately' let her know about the imagery I'd absorbed from her mind while healing her by mentioning the dress with the cupcakes on it. (That much was true - I'd felt that Liz needed to understand how intimate that contact had been for me, and known that she was easily smart enough to figure out that I couldn't know about that dress by normal experience.)

When she got to the part about how I'd reversed the connection and sent her a stream of uncensored thoughts from my own mind, things really got interesting. 'I could feel everything he was feeling,' Liz had written. 'I could feel his loneliness. For the first time I was really seeing Max Evans, I saw me as he saw me, and the *amazing* thing was, in HIS eyes, I was beautiful.' (The word 'beautiful' was underlined twice.) That installment ended with a fairly terse description of how I'd asked her if the process had worked, and left soon after. On the same double page was a shorter entry, dated the next day:

"Max Evans has put a force on me. It's like my whole life changed in an instant. It's just so ironic that when something like this finally happened to me, it was with an alien."

"I - I guess that I do see some of how much I've affected your life, ever since the beginning," I said softly after I'd read that. "There's a lot that it helps me understand. But - but do you really think that it's surprising I can see you're a beautiful person? Maybe I can see you a little deeper down than most of the other people in your life, but - but if Kyle Valenti, say, could really convey to you what he saw when he looked at you, then maybe that impression you got from me wouldn't have been so surprising."

Liz giggled. "Maybe. I guess that my self-image has adjusted a little for the better just in the weeks and months since I wrote that, for the better. But Kyle couldn't or didn't. That's another part of the point, that we can communicate so clearly, without even needing to use words."

"That's not so unique, either," I tried to protest. "You'll meet other guys, before you turn..."

"No, no, you don't get to use that argument on me, Max, not today," Liz interrupted. "I'm not interested in waiting for some other man who might come into my life one fine day. I want to move ahead with my life with the amazing person who I've already met, to give away my heart and risk letting it break and let the future worry about itself." She took a deep breath. "Are you up for any more reading, before you try writing?"

"Umm - okay, yeah," I said, not sure if I was as eager to give away my heart and risk it as Liz was, and if she gave me hers and I accepted it, I knew that I couldn't keep holding my own back for long. But that was something to mull over for my own writing, more than anything else. "How about two others, from different time periods? Good things come in threes."

"Alright, let's see." I held the journal out, Liz took it back, and started to riffle through the pages, going forward, since that first passage had been close to the day of the shooting, when we'd first come to know each other as anything but lab partners. "This is a long one, but good I think. I wrote it the night - the night that Grandma Claudia died."

"Okay." I should have guessed that Liz would have lots of big feelings about that event - about what she'd asked me to do for her beloved Grandma, my response, and what I'd been able to offer her as a consolation prize. I took the journal back and started to read:

"October Nineteenth. This is what I've been thinking: Can life ever go back to normal? Grandma Claudia told me that if things with Max weren't complicated, then he probably wasn't my soulmate. The tough thing about following your heart is what people forget to mention, that sometimes your heart takes you to places you shouldn't be, places that are as scary as they are exciting and as dangerous as they are alluring, and sometimes your heart takes you to places that can never lead to a happy ending. And that's not even the difficult part. The difficult part is when you follow your heart, you leave normal, you go into the unknown. And once you do, you can never go back."

I could tell that there was more, talking about having dumped Kyle because he didn't trust her and because 'He didn't even seem to understand that he had some ultimate responsibility for what happened to Max, even if he'd never laid a hand on him...' I looked up at Liz. "I - I didn't expect to read something like this here, not today. I - I'm scared of all of the same things that you are too, of those places that never have happy endings, of the unknown and leaving normal."

Liz smiled just slightly. "Ah. I didn't realize that you were - well, were so far behind me. Maybe - maybe what I was pushing for wasn't such a good idea, then. If you really do need more time, then just let me know, and I won't push the issue."

Somehow, her way of phrasing that as she backed off actually nettled my pride. (Had she been trying for that, as a kind of reverse psychology trick?) "Are you saying that you've already worked through these fears, that you're not scared of any of that stuff anymore?"

"Um - working through it sounds about right," Liz agreed, nodding. "Not that I've removed the fear from my heart - fear can be healthy, and this is scary stuff, scarier than most relationships. But I've made a decision to keep moving forward, to not let the fear stop me. And I do believe that happy endings can be found in the most unlikely places, Max." She sighed. "One more page, as we agreed, and then you get to write for yourself?"

"Sure, I guess," I said, wondering what she would come up with next.

It took Liz a long time to decide, realizing that she had only one share coming, and I watched as she flipped back and forth, marking different entries with her fingers, and finally narrowed the list down to two - and no further. "Can't make up your mind?" I asked sympathetically.

"No, not really," Liz admitted.

"What are the two choices, briefly?" I said. "I can read a few more after I write my own."

"Okay, umm - one is from after you got out of the hospital, before I was going to meet Alex and try to convince him not to tell Topolsky about the blood swap," she said. "The other - well, I had started it after we all got back from the Mesaliko reservation, and you came up to the balcony - do you remember? I finished it later."

Oh, right. The night that I told her I had to take a step back. I did remember that she'd been writing into her diary on the lounger when I first announced my presence. Immediately I shied away from reading Liz's before and after thoughts on that night. "Give me the Alex one."

Liz snickered, as if she had guessed what was going through my head. "It isn't all about Alex - but okay, here." She opened the book to the earlier of the two finger-marks and handed it back over.

"23 Nov 1999.

"Have you ever had a moment when you're with the one person in the world you want to be with and the wind is blowing through your hair and the song that just describes your entire soul happens to come on, and then the person that you want to be with happens to love the same song and suddenly you realize that you're listening to it *together*? And that no matter how crazy your life has gotten there's this one moment -- this perfect moment -- where you could just say that 'no matter what happens, nothing can take this moment away from me.'

"And then, something does.

"Max hit a horse up on the old highway, when the two of us were out cruising yesterday, skipping fourth period when Miss Hardy was out with the stomach flu. He banged himself up pretty badly, and he's physically okay now, but I'm not sure if everything will turn out all right, because the consequences of that moment have fallen down over our lives like dominoes. The ambulance came before either of us were really thinking clearly, and long before I could have moved Max safely by myself, and of course they took him to a hospital. Max and Isabel have never been to a hospital before this, never gotten sick, and known above anything else that they couldn't let somebody that they didn't trust absolutely run tests on their blood. But Max didn't have any say about the Emergency room staff taking his blood and sending it down for routine labs, and by the time any of us could do anything about it, there was only one workable plan.

"Switch out the samples for somebody who had perfectly normal, everyday blood with no surprises. And I could only think of somebody who would be a close enough match for the test results that Max wanted to get back.

"So I asked Alex, and after pouring on the pleadings, he agreed to help, but got really angry when I couldn't explain why Max needed the switch done, and why I was so concerned about him. I know that I can't tell Alex the truth, not yet when he's this angry, but Topolsky's trying to find some kind of evidence, and I almost think that Alex trusts her more than he does me. We don't know what Topolsky's really after or who she's working for, but she does seem to be on some kind of alien hunt.

"Moments. It's amazing how one can just change things so radically. How a wild horse deciding to cross the road at that exact time could be responsible for Max being discovered. I need one more moment now. One more chance to change direction, to stop something bad from turning into something worse."

That one was several pages, and I checked with Liz before turning the page each time, and she kept nodding. When I got to the end, I had to sit and think, though I wanted to actually say something out loud to Liz, but couldn't decide on what. Again, this wasn't a passage that I'd have expected Liz to share with me, since it wasn't even directly talking about the two of us dating, but the sequence of feelings that it painted was compelling. The exhilerated high of riding along that road together, listening to the same song and loving it simultaneously, the worry that she must have felt as the paramedics were checking me over, as they wheeled me into the emergency room to get tests that she knew could expose me, and that she didn't have any authority to stop. The wrenching conflict of having to drag Alex into this awkward situation for a favor without telling him the truth, and bearing the brunt of his anger without cracking in her resolve, and the desperation of coming up with one last attempt to win Alex over to trust her, at least temporarily, and still not telling him the secret that she believed could not be told.

That entire sequence, from the amazing high to the gut-wrenching low, it started and ended with me and Liz's feelings for me, and I was awed by the intensity and conviction that, like Liz's beauty, she might not be able to see with her own eyes. How could I possibly react in words spoken out loud to any of that?

"I... I still remember that song," I whispered, knowing that it sounded lame but not knowing any better way to start. "If I could have, I'd have stopped and avoided that horse safely - but maybe, looking back with a bit of hindsight, it's better that I didn't. For all the trials that we've been through - all three of us have been much more careful because of my stupidity, and we've learned a few things about covert ops in a hospital that just might be useful again. More importantly - because of that day, Alex knows, he's in on the conspiracy, and I do think that we're stronger with him than we were without, especially because you and Maria both have a weak side for him, because you've been friends for so long. He showed us that we can count on him - with Topolsky, with Valenti, and with the ritual when Michael was sick. And, of course, if it weren't for the opportunity she saw to use Alex against us, Topolsky would still have been spying on us, and we might not even have figured out anything about what she was up to yet." I took a deep breath. "And it brought us all closer together."

"Yeah, I guess I've thought the same sort of thing," Liz said softly. "Okay, so, do you want the pen now?" She offered it to me for the first time.

"Yeah, but - how far do I flip ahead? I don't want to..."

"For crying out loud, don't worry about it," Liz said. "Just skip ahead yourself, and don't dwell on anything you see - yet. I'm not sure I have anything that I'd really be embarassed about, now, come to think of it."

"Okay," I said, found the first double-page that was entirely blank, and started off. 'December 31st. I'm Max Evans, and...' Had to think about what came next for a moment, especially with Liz looking over my shoulder. (Well, beside my shoulder, she doesn't really come up over my shoulder when we're sitting next to each other like that.)

TO BE CONTINUED...

[Chrisken]

Hi everybody. The next part should be the last, and it'll be out in time for Valentine's day.

Part Three

"Alright, we should get moving again, I think," Liz decided, as I finished writing. "I hope we don't have that much further to go."

"I hope not," I said, though I really wasn't sure. I got up and handed the pen and the journal back to her. "What do you think?"

Liz automatically leaned in close as we started walking, pressing her side against me and letting her left arm circle me, the hand resting somewhere between my hip and bum, near the back pocket of my jeans. I had to struggle against the usual 'Liz effect' of her touch and nearness just to keep walking, but something daring inside of me wanted to make a slightly comparable gesture, so I let my own arm drape across her shoulders, touching the back of her neck through my jacket. She didn't close the journal's pages or put it in her purse, but went to the start of what I'd written and began to read aloud, quietly but not so quietly that I couldn't hear my own words in her voice, as near as we were to each other like this.

"My name is Max Evans, and I'm trying to find the heart of my courage, to fight back my fears," she repeated. "I've already done some things, since meeting you, that I'd call brave. I didn't hesitate when somebody pulled a gun in the Crashdown, I just did what I knew needed to be done, and didn't think about the danger. I walked into that geodesic dome house in Marathon, and down into the secret room underneath, even though I was scared of both, and I found enough courage to kiss you the night after the heat wave broke.

"But there's still things that I'm scared of. I'm afraid of FBI alien hunters like Topolsky - I didn't stand up to her, I let you and Alex run her out of town for all of our sakes - and of finding out that people like me are killers, like the stories that Valenti told. And I'm very scared of - of opening up my heart and letting you in, not because I don't think that you care about me and would try to spare my feelings if you could, but because taking a chance like that makes you the most vulnerable that any person can ever be, and good intentions are no guarantees of happily ever after. There are no guarantees about that.

"And there's no rational arguments about a decision like this. Courage or caution? Do you see the glass half empty or half full, the risks or the rewards? Jump off the diving board or climb down the stairs backwards? It's a choice you have to make in your heart, not your head, and I'm not there yet."

I went over the double page with that, just a little bit, but Liz didn't seem to mind. "That - that helps, Max," Liz said after a moment. "It's very honest, and I guess I should thank you for sharing it with me." She sighed. "But it means that trying to persuade you is pointless, doesn't it? When it's right, you'll know."

"Trying to persuade me with logical arguments won't work," I said. "Who knows what might make a connection in my subconscious or whatever? Either way, so beware before taking your chances."

"I'll always take a chance for your sake, Max," Liz repeated immediately. "That's what today is all about."

"Umm, okay," I mumbled, not quite sure what to say at once. "Do you want to read something more of yours, as we go?"

"Hmm." Liz considered that, and flipped back quite a few pages in the journal. "This one I actually wrote on the drive back from Marathon."

"Yeah, I remembered that you had your pen out in the back of the Jeep," I pointed out. "Okay, say on,"

"All logic is gone," she read as the two of us walked side by side. "Here were my plans last night - finish my shift, dinner with the parents, half hour of talking to Maria on the phone, then dive into this issue I've been having with geometry, and hopefully finish in time to watch this A&E biography on Madame Curie. Instead, I took off in an open-air vehicle that probably shouldn't be allowed on the road to begin with, broke into a house, essentially stole things from it, and engaged in general bonding with aliens. Welcome to my world."

"Yeah, that sounds about right," I agreed, laughing, once Liz paused for long enough to signal that she'd either read the entire entry, or as much as she wanted to share just then.

"My life has defini--" Just at that moment, literally in mid-word, things suddenly went wrong. I never saw exactly what had happened with her feet but when Liz stopped speaking I realized that she was pitching forward, her balance hopelessly lost, and instinctively I reached out for her - and could only catch her near forearm with my hand. "URRKG!" she went as the shock of most of her weight and momentum went through her arm and mine, and her course towards the ground was disturbed into a circular arc that brought her around in front of me, but though she scrabbled with her feet a little bit, she still couldn't get them flat on the ground from that angle.

A second or two later, Liz's body swung gently to a stop, nearly horizontal, and she wheezed faintly and then whined a little bit later. Her left arm was still bearing nearly all of her weight, and I could tell that had to be very uncomfortable for her. (My right had the same amount of strain on it, but I would tend to assume that my upper body is a bit stronger than hers and I'm used to supporting a little bit more weight.) A few fancy maneuvers ran through my head, mostly attempts to turn this haphazard partial save into something a bit more dashing and noble, ideally with Liz cradled in my arms by the end of it - but all of them involved too much of a risk of dropping her into absolute ignominy. So, figuring that sticking with a partial save was better than taking a chance of losing it all, I gently lowered her onto the uneven rocks that passed for 'ground' at this spot. Liz groaned with something like relief, and didn't complain, so I counted that as appreciation for my choice. "How's the arm?" I asked.

"My shoulder hurts something awful," Liz admitted. "Probably not dislocated or anything, though. Thanks for trying to catch me, though I have to admit I'm not sure it wouldn't have been just as bad to take the fall directly."

"I wasn't thinking of it in those terms in that moment," I admitted. "You were falling away from me, and there was no time to weigh the pros and cons - I reached out for you instinctively."

"Interesting," Liz said, with a faint chuckle, and stretched out her right arm. "First step, could you help pull me up to a sitting position, so that I don't have to deal with this sharp rock pointing into the back of my neck?"

"Sure - I think that I can do something else to help out too," I said, reaching out both hands to take hers. Once Liz was sitting up, the first thing that she did was flex her left upper arm through a wide circle of motion, wonderingly.

"You fixed it that quickly?" she said, wonderingly.

"I've been practicing with minor injuries," I said. "Seemed like it would come in handy at some point, though I didn't expect as random an incident as that. What did you trip over, anyway? Just a jagged rock outcropping on the ground?"

"Well, I think so," Liz said, getting to her feet herself, (and spinning around in the process so I had a good look at her butt flexing back and forth - in those tight jeans.) "I didn't really get a good look at it, now did I? If I did, I probably wouldn't have lost my balance so badly. It's all that journal's fault - and do you have any idea where it landed?"

"Umm, not immediately, but..." It only took a few seconds for Liz to find the book, which had landed open on its back, and she immediately stowed it back into her purse, deciding that it had caused enough trouble. I could hardly argue with that decision.

For one thing, we were definitely getting into rougher territory, that was on the very fringe of what I'd explored before, and I had to concentrate hard on dream imagery (and keep looking around behind me and squatting down to six-year old height every so often,) to avoid simply blundering along by blind luck. Liz stayed mostly silent, as if she thought that I needed that to concentrate, and though a part of me wanted to hear her voice, I couldn't really think of anything to start a conversation about, so we continued on in the quiet.

It was maybe ten minutes later that I did the turn-and-crouch maneuver one last time - and laughed, hardly sure whether to believe that it was going to be this easy. "What, we're here?" Liz said, quickly tuning into what my mood could mean.

"Nearly," I explained, pointing up a rough, rocky hill. I could remember climbing down a pathway on that hill so vividly, it surprised me that that impression hadn't always been something that I could describe in detail. "The cave entrance is about halfway up. There should be a kind of a path."

"Really?" Liz repeated. "I guess this wasn't what I pictured when you said a cave - one of the openings in the desert ground or something like that."

I hadn't been clear enough on what I remembered until just a few minutes before to rule that out, I realized, but didn't want to say that out loud, at least, not yet. It almost felt as if admitting my doubts in this mountain might affect our chances of finding what I wanted so desperately to find there. So I just took Liz's hand in mine again, feeling a trace of her apprehension and hope as I did so, and walked slantwise towards the rock. As we approached it, the pathway became clear, and it was wide enough for us to climb side by side. I took the outer edge, just in case.

The path took us both most of the way up the rock - and then sort of petered out into a ledge that could only have been navigated with a lot of risk, even on tiptoe pointing in at the hillside, and though that ledge wandered around a corner, out of sight, it didn't exactly promise to widen out any time soon. Looking at it, I could feel more and more strongly that that was not the way that I'd come, as a little boy. But if not, then... "No, stay well away from there, please," I said softly to Liz, who seemed to be cautiously inching forwards to that perilous way. "I - I think that it's back here." Just a few paces back, the pathway was at its widest, almost a sort of a rough landing made of stone, and the hillside was particularly straight, and flat, and featureless.

"Well, what now?" Liz asked. "I don't see any sort of a - a button, or handle, or anything. Do we have to stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks? Or just call 'OPEN SESAME?'"

"Somehow I love you more than ever for the Tolkien reference," I said with a big grin spreading over my face. "But no, we're not in 'The Hobbit', or Ali Baba or any other story. If there's a hidden door here, then it's alien, not magic... and I think I have a clue as to how the mechanism would work. Remember how this whole thing got started?" I held up my right hand, all the fingers splayed nearly as far as they would go, and Liz jumped a little, startled by that reference to my saving her life, and the silver handprint that had been on her skin as a sign of my power for a few days after.

But after an instant's surprise, Liz nodded, accepting this guess of mine. "Yeah, okay, but - if that's the key, then we still need to find the lock."

"Right," I agreed, and stepped towards the wall of stone, because if there was going to be a door, it seemingly had to be in there somewhere. At first I couldn't detect any real sign that this approach would work, but as I moved my hand back and forth, trying to keep a faint current of energy running through it, I could feel something like a very faint magnetic attraction, making it easier to pull my hand further out to the right and harder to draw it back to the left. Extending my arm all the way out wasn't far enough, so I stepped in that direction, being very careful about my footing and how close the edges were. But after only a few feet, we could both see a spot glowing on the rock in a faint silvery-blue. Probably nothing that I could have spotted with my eyes in the bright morning light - this ledge faced east, back towards the distant highway, and the sun was nearly down to the hill by this point. But I could have told that right alignment from the feel of it.

The shining handprint on the rock was impressive though, and served as a clue to Liz. Handy for making the placement of my fingers exactly right, too.

As soon as I made contact, some unknown mechanism started to rumble to life inside the hill, retracting a section of the smooth stone surface - a mostly rectangular shape with rounded corners. Once a depression several inches deep had been revealed, that same section slid very slowly and creakily to the side, affording us an entrance into the Pod Cave.

"Come on!" I said, excitedly stretching my hand out to Liz. She seemed to be almost stock still with astonishment at all this, but when I grasped her hand that startled her back into action, and we climbed through the open doorway that had been revealed nearly together. We had hardly finished passing through when it began to close again, and Liz gasped in shock. "Max, what if you can't..." she breathed, stepping back as if she was hoping to slip through again before the way was closed off entirely.

"I'm not worried," I told her, refusing to let go. "Whatever this place is, we found our way out somehow, when we were practically newborn children. And obviously something believes that I have a right to come in again, or it wouldn't have opened the door. It doesn't make sense to trap us inside now."

"It doesn't have to make sense by human terms," Liz grumbled. "It's *alien*."

"Don't knock aliens too much," I joked with her, as the door-rock slid closed and started to work its way back to the position where it would sit flush with the rest of the rock face. That meant, of course, that bright outside light was not flooding in any more, and for a few seconds neither of us could see much at all, because the interior of the Pod Cave was not well lit at all. But eventually my eyes adjusted enough to what seemed like faintly blue glowing moulding that I could make out some details, and judging by the tension in Liz's hand, she was starting to feel less frightened too, so I guessed that maybe she could make do with the light as well.

There wasn't much to see where we were, just a sort of a bare vestibule space near the door, but I could see that a larger chamber was further along, deeper inside the rocky hill. I couldn't see that much of the room, but there was one thing that I thought I could certainly see. I looked over to Liz and whispered in a certain bemused delight, "*Four* incubation pods?"

"Umm, I'm not sure, but I don't think I can see four of anything, from here," she replied in a more normal speaking voice. "If the things that I can see are incubation pods, then I only see two of them." For a few seconds I was disappointed, then tried to judge the angles somewhat, (don't tell me that trig and geometry have no application in real life!) and realized that yes, the foot and a half of seperation between our viewpoints was probably enough to hide some of the pods from her view, if they were about as far away as I thought they were. (I couldn't see all of that set myself, just a slice.)

Liz must have thought of the same thing, because she leaned way over, until her head was more or less in front of my upper chest, hair just a few inches below my nose. "Okay, yeah, there's two more." I couldn't resist the urge to run a few fingers through her soft dark hair when it had started to brush against the back of my hand, and once I'd tucked enough of it behind Liz's ear to expose most of the ear itself, it was even harder to fight against another affectionate impulse. Liz cooed and sighed deep in her chest when I licked the rim of her ear and sucked gently on the earlobe, but after only a few seconds, she managed to mumble, "I hate to even bring up the rules, but does this count as kissing before midnight?"

"Oooh." Most of me hated that she'd mentioned it as well, but, well... "Um." I disengaged lips from earlobe. "Maybe. Probably not, as such, by the letter of the rules, but by the spirit in which I instituted the 'no kissing' rule, earplay or whatever is probably something that we should also stay away from. If only because it would be too easy to slip from there to lip-on-lip action without caring about the rules, once we really got started." Liz went uh-huh regretfully. "So I guess we call this a warning, not a true violation."

"You can worry about warning yourself," Liz told me with a faint giggle. "I'm going to take a look inside the pod cave proper."

"Not without me, you're not," I said as sternly as I could manage, and we stepped into the open room more or less together. I didn't really think that there were likely any traps or features that would be dangerous to somebody who wasn't an alien - but it was hard to be sure. Whoever had originally put us (the three of us plus a mysterious one?) here might have been worried that the palmprint door wasn't sufficient protection against 'meddling humans' finding the cave and investigating its secrets. And what would Topolsky or the people behind her in the FBI have made out of a place like this, anyway?

But nothing dangerous seemed to manifest immediately, and though I kept up my guard, most of our attention was taken up by the bank of four pods, two high and two wide, at the far end of the room. And, of course, the innate mystery that they represented. "So, any ideas who the fourth pod was for?" Liz asked, her voice starting to become softer as she approached them. "Nasedo?"

"I - I don't know," I had to admit. "I guess if I had any guesses about Nasedo and - and this place that we came from, I would have guessed that he was the one who put our pods here in the fourth - err, sorry, I meant to say the first place."

"Freudian slip?" Liz asked, gesturing again to the four pods.

"Yeah. And there would definitely have had to be an alien to build all of this - the door and the lighting and all. So if that wasn't Nasedo, who was it?"

"Good point." Liz sighed. "So I guess Occam's razor won't slice through this for us. There has to be one more alien entity running around... oh, no, there's at least one other possibility. Could one of these pods be a spare? Never used??"

"Hmm... worth considering," I shot back, loving this sort of investigation and detective work into an alien mystery, with Liz by my side and challenging my assumptions. I moved close enough to the pods that I could touch them if I wanted to, (though I didn't, yet.) The ambient light didn't seem to be enough for a close examination, so I used the glowing hand trick to shed a bit more light on the pods, and cringed slightly. Liz jumped back a fraction of an inch in alarm. There were fibers of white stuff hanging off the pod openings, and lying on the floor just below them, and some sort of dried gelatinous goo still inside the pod cavities. The white fibers reminded me of the ones that had grown around Michael's body, cocooning him when he went into a coma after being in River Dog's sweatlodge, a few weeks ago.

"I - I think that they must be remnants of whatever was used to feed us and keep us safe when we were growing inside the pods," I told Liz, though I wasn't sure that I could defend this guess if she challenged it. "And there are these traces around and inside all four pods. I really do think that all four of them were used."

"So there's some other alien kid out there, maybe one who's only been around since 1989, like the three of you?" Liz summarized, turning away from the pods and wandering towards some nearly empty shelves that were sitting to the left of the exit, when I was looking at them from the pods at least. (They would have been to our right as we entered.) I hurried over, just in case one of the few dimly visible relics that I could see sitting there might be dangerous. "Okay, umm - we should search the entire - the entire chamber. I can't really call it a cave, now that I've seen the inside of it. There might be more mysteries that we haven't even seen yet."

"No, we need to leave soon," I countered. Liz stared at me, looking disappointed. "I'm somewhat sorry, but - well, there's a lot of good reasons. The afternoon was already getting away from us when we went in here, and we need to find our way back to the Jeep before full night hits, or it'll be much harder to navigate on foot in the desert. I'm still a little worried about something that might be dangerous if it's handled by a - well, a human, and..."

"And you want to give Isabel and Michael the chance to call part of this place their own," Liz guessed, with a resigned sigh. "It's going to be hard enough on Michael that I was the one with you when you found it." I nodded. "Okay, umm - we need to take a few pictures, though. To show them." She pulled the little camera out of her bag.

"Okay, umm - you realize that these photos can't possibly be showed to..."

"Come on, Max, I'm not stupid," Liz insisted. "Of course I'll take good care of them. Umm - do you want to pose next to the pods or something like that?" She laughed at the notion, so went and stood next to them, resting one hand on the top of an upper-row pod and gesturing with my other arm like it was up for bidding on the Price is Right's contestants row. The flash of the camera seemed dazzlingly bright in that dim chamber, and I stared at the pod for a moment as my eyes gradually recovered, wondering what it would be like to climb out of the top row of pods as a little alien kid. And that managed to jog my memory.

"I *was* on the top row, and I had to figure out how to climb down after I tore open the - the membrane across the front of the pod," I whispered, reaching out to poke my fingers through that circular opening that was now unblocked. "I - I remember seeing Isabel and Michael for the first time here, in this chamber, before we went outside to explore the great wide world. We must all have been still covered with the - well, whatever goo it was inside the pods. They both looked sticky with it, and I remember feeling it on my arms, all over my skin." I took a deep breath. "And - and I think I can remember looking at the one pod that was still sealed. That one, down there, on the bottom left."

"Oh my god, Max," Liz breathed. "Was - was there someone inside it?"

"Yes. I - I can't remember much, just a faint impression of a face - a little girl sleeping, with her eyes still closed and blonde curly hair floating around her head. She had a kind of triangular face, I guess, and her eyebrows were scrunched up as if she was having a bad dream in there."

"Wow." Liz crossed close to take my hand again. "You - you've never seen her since? I mean, do you think you would recognize this girl if you came across her in school or something, and she was sixteen like the rest of us are?"

"Umm - yeah, I think I'd remember if I'd seen her, but I can't be sure," Max said. "I'll definitely know if I see her again, now that I've remembered seeing her here."

"Okay, umm - do you want to go now?" Liz asked.

"How many more exposures are left on that film?" I put to her in turn.

"Umm." Liz squinted cutely at the camera. "I can't read it." I gave her some silvery glow. "Okay, seven more shots."

"Take five of them in here," I suggested. "I'd suggest mostly concentrating on the pods - closeups and different angles. Then give the camera to me, and we'll head out."

"Okay - do you have plans for those last two spots on the roll?" she said.

"Why, I believe that I just might," I told her in my best 'banter' tone of voice.

-----------

"Okay, that makes some sense," Liz said as I snapped a picture of the chamber door from outside, just as it was about halfway through closing. (It hadn't been hard at all to open the door from inside - hadn't even taken my handprint, actually - it had opened as soon as Liz touched the wall near the door.) "That was impressive enough to take a visual record of. Are - are you going to use the last picture on the hill from a little ways away?"

"Umm, no, that wasn't what I'd planned on," I admitted, as we started down the rock path, the camera still in my hands. "Wouldn't that mean that somebody might be able to use it to find this particular piece of rock out of the whole desert?"

"Well - yeah, I guess that was what I had in mind," Liz admitted uncertainly. "That Michael and Isabel might want to come here without you being around to lead them, or having to give them terribly detailed directions beforehand. Are - are you terribly worried about somebody else finding the pictures, still?"

"I guess so," I admitted slowly. "Paranoia starts to make sense after you find out that somebody really is out to get you, after all. But even if we discount that kind of reasoning, I do have some better use to put that last picture to, okay?"

"Umm, sure, of course," Liz said, and nodded. As we reached the bottom of the hill, she offered her hand to me, and I took it - and gasped as a rush of images overcame me - that stunned look on her face before she was shot, the cool breeze of the night that we first kissed, after the heatwave broke, the sound of the Jeep's engine as we rode together on the old Highway. Liz turned to me and smiled. "Okay, so any updates on the subject of you and me?" she asked teasingly.

"You - you drive me crazy, and I think you like knowing that," I accused, and Liz giggled nervously. "But in general - I think that I'm ready to take that leap of faith, if you are. I can't put my fears to rest in a single day, but I don't have to let them call the shots. You're worth facing my fears for, Liz Parker." Deep breath. "That is, if you'll have me, on those terms - if you wouldn't be too worried that I might push you away some day next week. I'll try my best not to, try to always let you share what's going on with me and carry the load as best you can, but that's about all that I can promise. And bearing that in mind, you can have your kiss at midnight."

"Of course I'll be with you no matter what you're still struggling with, Max," Liz told me, the tenderness nearly coating her words. "I'll be struggling too - this is heavy stuff, and no matter how smart, brave, or in love two teenagers are, few of them manage to make even an ordinary relationship work long-term. We'll have all of the challenges that they struggle with and more to contend with - but I think that we also have a few more advantages to help us out. But whether we can hang together and keep our love strong - that's still up to us." She pulled me close in a side-to-side hug that kept me from making any forward progress - not that I was complaining. "I'm so glad that I came to your door this morning."

"Yeah, yeah, rub it in, why don't you," I laughed back. We started walking back hand in hand again, and I set the course a little to the left of the way that we'd come. It didn't take too long for Liz to notice that little detail.

"What's the idea?" was all she said.

"Just wait and see," I advised, picking up the pace slightly because I knew that Liz wouldn't wait patiently for too long. Thankfully, the spot that I had in mind wasn't far off. I wasn't sure what made me think of that particular place in the desert, except that looking back east, someone could stand in the light of the setting sun and be framed between a five-foot high rock to the left, and a much higher, much more distant one off to the right. With a few words I directed Liz into the spot I had in mind, and brought out the camera.

"Okay, okay, I guess I can't make too much of a fuss," she said, delivering a sigh that I thought was probably overdramatic. "But take the pic and let's get on with it. The sun's not too far from setting, and it's annoying having to face into it like this."

"Okay, I'll be quick," I told her, putting my eye to the little viewfinder. The framing was just as great as I'd imagined - there was a little ravine or crack in the desert a few feet behind her, but it somehow added to the visual effect, so I pushed the shutter button and it went click. No flash, but then, there wasn't enough light for it. I checked and the dial for the film was down to zero.

"I think it was a great shot, sweetie," I said, stepping forward towards Liz, and taking a great and foolish pleasure in being able to call her that. I was even holding the camera out towards her, as if I expected her to be able to take a look at the picture that I'd just taken, like it was a polaroid or one of those digital cameras that I'd seen on television. And that was the moment where everything went wrong.

Because, you see, it was my turn to trip on a stone ridge and lose my balance for a moment. I stumbled for only a moment and then caught it again, but the damage was done.

The camera had flown out of my hand. Liz tried to step over and catch it once she realized what was happening, but she wasn't in time.

And the darn thing bounced once and went over the edge of the drop!

It was only a few seconds before Liz and I were standing at the lip of the precipice, staring down it. We could just make out a small black shape against the ivory sand down there, even though nothing was in direct light.

"I don't think it's even broken or anything," Liz mentioned.

"I'd almost rather it were," I muttered under my breath. Liz gasped. "If the film was ruined, at least we wouldn't need to worry about someone else finding it first."

"Oh, right - I see." Liz sighed. "I - I don't really see a way down there."

"Not an easy way." I made a big production out of taking off my backpack and pulling out the rope. There was even a smaller rock very close to the edge that I could tie it around. "I know that this is probably crazy - that we'll be losing light even before we can climb down there, but right now I'm hell-bent on trying. Are you going to make an effort to talk me out of craziness, or are you going to let me do this?"

"Let you do it?" Liz exclaimed. "Don't be crazy, Max, of course I'm not going to *let* you do this!"

We just stared at each other for a long moment.

TO BE CONTINUED...

[Chrisken]

A/N: Okay, so this isn't quite the last part, but 5 should be a very short one. I know that all you dreamers are probably hanging on and waiting for that kiss, and I'll do my best not to shortchange you!

Part Four

"Okay," I said, somehow knowing that I was giving Liz a setup line, but not sure what the punch line would be, "you're not going to let me do this. How are you going to stop it?"

And she reached forward and put her hand on the rope, next to mine. "Stop it? Max, I'm going down with you!"

Well, I'd been expecting a punch line, hadn't I?

Even though I felt the usual protectiveness, something deep down clued me in that it wouldn't be a good idea to try to stop Liz Parker in this moment. "Okay, who goes down first?"

"Is it worth bringing up what Sam Gamgee said about ropes, or would that be too much Tolkien for one day?"

"I'm not sure if there's such a thing as too much Tolkien," I admitted, a bit reluctantly. "What did Sam have to say?"

"That you put the one who's more likely to fall first going down and last going up, so that they won't knock anybody else off the rope. But I'm not sure who that is - and I have to say, you probably shouldn't risk yourself unless there's no other choice, because if I get hurt you can save me. Maybe you should stay up here unless I really do need you."

"My talents aren't absolute, remember that, Liz Parker," I said warningly. "For one thing, if you actually died before I could reach you, I don't think that there's anything that alien powers could do. You can go first if that makes you feel better, but I'm following right after."

"Okay, okay, twist my arm," she said, and I had to wonder if she'd just mentioned the bit about me staying behind altogether so that I wouldn't raise too much of a fuss about her going first. But at least I could wonder silently.

As I was wondering, Liz walked calmly over to the edge of the drop, picked up the rope in both hands, and backed up to the cliff edge, looking behind her as if uncertain just how to proceed when she got there. I got a very bad feeling. "Wait a second," I blurted out.

But she didn't wait. Quickly enough that I didn't get a good sense of the tradition, she sort of stepped backward off the edge, and paused when most of her legs were hidden from view. "Take a chill pill - Relax, Max," she quipped with a reassuring smile, and then more of her sank out of view.

I rushed forward, more curious about how she was managing than anything else at this point. As far as I could tell from peering over the edge, Liz's body was gracefully curved, so that her feet went flat against the sheer surface while her head was nearly upright. At least she hadn't gone for impractical high heels when she dressed to impress this morning - well, anything but sensible shoes would already have driven her crazy as we hiked through the desert, I supposed. The jeans were probably also alright for that kind of thing, (and somewhat mesmerizing as she shifted her hips back and forth when looking for new footholds,) and if the sweater got torn against a rock - well, she'd be lucky if that was the worst that happened to her, I supposed. Not that that made me feel particularly better.

"Are you coming down?" Liz prompted when she was at least ten feet down. "The rock is the perfect temperature - not too warm, and not too cold." She giggled enthusiastically at her own joke.

"Umm - shouldn't you wrap the rope around you or something?" I asked her nervously. It didn't seem to be that much security held in her hands. If her grip slipped...

"Ehh - not now. I thought about that, but wasn't sure how to actually make that work helpfully without a proper safety harness, and neither of us know how to make one," she called back. "Didn't want to just get rope burns all over, which seemed the likeliest result. I'll be fine this way."

Hmm - she did have a point. "Okay, umm..." I tried to pick up the rope myself, but it was impossible to budge it - or at least I didn't want to tug hard enough to affect Liz's balance. "Do you think that you could stay in place for a little while, and hand me back up some slack in the rope?"

"Oh, right, I didn't think of that one," Liz admitted. "Um - we can try it, but that means that you'll be steadying a lot of my weight still, right?"

"Yeah," I agreed. "I won't let you fall."

We tried it, with some more calling back and forth, but that approach didn't really work out. I could hold the rope against all the force that Liz was exerting upon it as she leaned against the cliff - but I couldn't really figure out how to back over the cliff and steady MYSELF against it, while still carrying Liz's weight. (I shudder to think how she would have fared if I'd been the one to go down first, now.) Eventually, I fed Liz back the slack in the rope until it was taught, and scrambled down over the edge while hanging onto the top with my hands, like I used to get into the pool when I was a little kid because I was scared to just jump in. That analogy was probably unfortunate, as I had to deal with a mental picture of myself jumping - or worse, diving - into this ravine. Not fun.

But I was able to climb down to the point where my hands were straight over my head, and then to use the taut rope as a handhold without having to take any slack in it myself, and thus not having to support any of Liz's weight myself, just letting it take some of mine. This was working pretty well, when I felt the rope jerk a little, which was scary, and then heard a cry from fairly far below me, which was even scarier. I knew that I couldn't look down, not even to see if Liz was alright, without getting sicker of the height than I could afford at that moment. "Liz? Please answer me," I called out clearly.

"Yeah, Max, I'm - I'm not too badly hurt, but I guess I'm in a bit of a tight spot," Liz admitted, and let out an awkward sounding grunt. "My - my left foot got wedged into a crevice, I guess it was bigger than I thought, or the wrong shape or whatever. It - I can't get it out, and I still can't balance here without putting most of my weight on the rope. My hands are really starting to get tired."

"Okay, is that it? Any sharp pain in the foot?" I asked, hoping to reassure myself with the answer.

"Well, yeah actually. Something might be broken, I'm not sure," Liz admitted. Dammit.

"Okay, plan A. I'm coming down to you. Let me know at ONCE if I'm doing anything that's making it harder for you to keep a grip on the rope."

"Umm, okay, but what are you going to do once you're right above me?" Liz asked.

"Err - just let me know when I get that close, okay?" I said.

"Alright, Max." She kept making little soft whining sounds as I climbed, but the words I was so worried about hearing: 'Stop Max, I can't hold in like this,' didn't come. Finally, it was, "Okay, I can see your shoes, maybe a foot and a half above my head. Now what?"

Now what, indeed? I had a few ideas, but first I really did need to get a sense of how high we were, and risked one quick look down. It wasn't that bad, mostly because I'd climbed nearly all the way down. Liz was actually close enough to the floor of the ravine that if she hadn't been the one with her foot stuck, she could probably have dropped or jumped down and been okay. But if she lost her grip on the rope now, that would probably send all of her weight on that one leg in the wrong way, breaking bones below the knee, and she still wouldn't be free, just hanging in a very awkward angle.

Well, could *I* manage to drop or jump down, or even climb without the use of the rope? Possibly - that would get me where I needed to be at least, on solid ground within reach of Liz, able to help investigate the tight place that she was stuck in and use my powers if I could see a way in which they would avail us. But I was either too scared or too cautious to commit myself to that jump without a backup plan - if I hit too hard the wrong way and passed out, then there would be nobody left to help Liz.

And luckily, there was a 'second chance' sort of an idea that had been hovering in the back of my mind since not long after the camera had fallen. Now seemed to be the time when I had little to lose in trying it.

"Just keep holding on, Liz," I implored her, and reached out for a rocky projection, just big enough to get a grip on with a few fingers, that was conveniently just as far to the left as my arm would span. In a moment I was hanging into that spur with both hands, one over the other, and my feet were instinctively scrabbling for a foothold and finding none. Right. Really nothing to lose now. I swung myself a bit further left, just to make sure I would be clear of Liz, took a moment to gather what energies I could, let go...

And I used my powers to *push* the ravine floor down as hard as I could manage.

Of course, the rocky ground couldn't possibly go any further down - it was supported by deeper and denser stone, all the way down into the Earth's crust. But that was the point. We've all learned about action and reaction in science class, equal and opposite reaction, and I've learned that alien powers are subject to that same effect too.

When I used alien powers to pull a heavy trophy from the fireplace mantel to the couch, I felt the reaction tugging me back towards the fireplace.

And when I pushed the ground down, the reaction pushed me back up. Not enough to overcome gravity and let me float in midair, but just enough to cushion the fall, somewhat.

I landed on my right foot an instant before the left came down too, and the impact on both was enough to wind me, but I knew that I couldn't just stand around waiting for my breath to come back. I rushed over to Liz, not quite sure what I was supposed to do to help her, and all of a sudden she was falling into my arms, and I couldn't support her and we both fell down in a pile on the ground. "Liz - Liz!" I panted. "Are you okay? Your leg?"

"Yeah, it's - well, it's still not in perfect shape, but it's no worse than it was," she said, rather more brightly.

"How did you get it out of the crevice?"

"Well, you did it," she said, sounding confused. "Or at least you helped - didn't you realize what you were doing?"

"Uh, I don't think I realized much in that moment, except that you needed me," I admitted.

"You sort of supported my back and - and my behind, with your chest, as soon as you came near," Liz explained. "With that leverage, it was easy enough to pull the foot out - it almost came by myself as my weight shifted. And then - I was so relieved that I let go of the rope."

"Okay, well, all's well that ends reasonably well," I said. "But we're still losing light that we need. First thing, I need to take a closer look at your foot, and fix it up right. Second, we need to find that camera."

"Sorry to spoil the order, but I think I'm looking right at the cam," Liz explained. "Maybe fifteen feet away from us."

"That's alright I guess."

"And third," Liz said with a sigh. "We need to find some better way out of this ravine than climbing up the rope again."

"Yeah, I won't argue with that idea," I said reluctantly. Gravity had helped us both somewhat going down, and Liz had been hurt. Once we had the camera, what's left of the urgency seemed to be over with. Even if we'd have to stay out all night and have our midnight kiss alone, that seemed better than taking more immediate risks.

So with a bit of reluctance Liz climbed off of me, sat down on a slight rise in the rocky valley bottom, and started to untie her shoelaces, wincing in pain at even that much sensation near the source of her injury. I reached out to take her hand and meet her eyes, initiating enough of a connection to put her in a sort of an anaesthetic trance, before carefully pulling the shoe off myself - and gasping at the blood and the messy condition of her two smallest toes. In a few more seconds I had confirmed that they were both broken.

But that wouldn't take me long to fix.

------------

"Okay, yeah, this should work, I hope," I said, looking up at the pathway that seemed to make its way up the side of the ravine - the other side from where Liz and I had gone down, but I was pretty sure that we'd be able to find our way from that point to the place where I'd parked the Jeep. The quarter to half mile that we'd walked along the valley floor was already ground covered in mostly the right direction.

I breathed a silent sigh of relief that Liz hadn't thought to leave her purse - with the journal still in it - at the top of the cliff where I'd taken her picture. Holding it as she climbed down might have been part of the reason that she'd gotten her foot into a tight spot, but I wasn't about to tell her so now, as the twilight started to close in. My old knapsack was sitting up there still, next to the place that the rope was tied, but it didn't have anything important in it or indeed identifiable, mostly just empty snack food packages that I hadn't wanted to litter the desert with. My wallet and my car keys were in my pockets, and they were the important things, aside from ourselves and the frickin' camera.

"So, I guess it's back to questions time," Liz said as we started to climb along the fairly easy route up - not really a ramp-like path, but a sort of an angled bite out of the rock face - steeper than a pathway I'd want to hike along for long under normal circumstances, but much more inviting than true rock climbing. We both went very carefully and grabbed holds wherever we could. "So when did you learn to - well, to fit in with people as well as you do? I've been watching you for the last few months a lot, you know, and you really are very good at it. Not too surprising I guess, at least for a 'normal' guy, but I guess I have a hard time reconciling that with the little boy who didn't even understand how he was so different from everybody else. There has to have been a learning process, obviously."

"Hmm - I don't know, I never really thought I was that good at hiding the alienation inside," I muttered, trying to think of a better answer. "I guess I'd say that Isabel was the master at social camouflage, blending into any situation. I've learned a lot from her, and the lessons haven't always been fun."

"Wha huh?" I'm not sure how often I've ever heard Liz Parker reduced to quite such low depths of bad enunciation.

"Around the time that we were finishing junior high - well, Isabel started to brood on the notion of public discovery. She'd lecture me and keep on my case about anything that wasn't 'normal' - including things like science club and what remained of my fascination with comic books. I suppose some of it wasn't that different from how any other popular sister, conscious of the herd mentality, might nag her considerably dorkier brother, but the unspoken truth about our true heritage hypercharged the whole business."

"Somehow more than anything else, I can never really picture you as a dork, Max," Liz commented with a soft, pleased sigh.

That was about when we got to the end of the climb and I pointed us off along the edge of the fissure - giving it a wide clearance, of course. We'd gotten up there just in time to admire some pretty sunset effects, although the sun itself could no longer be glimpsed over the horizon. We kept talking about more and more trivial things, starting to become each comfortable with the other's company, and I felt growing inside me such a deep sense of happiness and contentment that I could hardly even imagine why I'd been afraid of this, how I hadn't been able to tell that everything would be alright as long as Liz and I leaned on each other and talked out our fears.

And, I have to admit, I also wanted to kiss her so bad that it was making my toes tingle, but managed to resist that impulse. We'd both sworn that we could hold out the day, no matter what, and focusing on how great it could be when all that anticipation finally paid off at midnight helped out somewhat.

"Are you sure that we're headed in the right direction?" Liz asked after finishing answering a question about something in her and Alex and Maria's shared history that had managed to make the grapevine for a few days last spring at West Roswell High.

"Come on. You should know that this isn't going to work if you don't trust me too," I teased her.

"If you're sure, then I have faith," she insisted. "I was just asking. And pointing out that it's - huh, only quarter after six?"

"The sun sets early this close to winter solstice," I reminded her. "We'll probably have plenty of time for some other activity once we get back to the car. I don't particularly want to show up at my Mom's party earlier than eleven - unless you do."

"Hmm - no, that's okay," Liz admitted. "Let's see - there won't be any place open where we can get the pictures developed, but it'd probably be a good idea to hide the camera - like in my hidey-hole spot for the journal, unless you have any better ideas."

"Wait a moment," I said, grinning. "Even if the photomart was open - do you really want to let a semi-professional look at these shots? I think that the only really safe course is to expose them ourselves. And neither of us really have legitimate access to a darkroom. So why not - on a night when nobody will be around, say, the school building?"

Liz laughed. "I love it. Except - isn't the school one of the usual places for clues to that Enigma secret party thing?"

"Oh, right, I hadn't thought of that," I admitted. "Well, that could work in our favor, actually. We wouldn't have to break in, not if somebody else left a door open so that other people could sneak in and take a look, and if anybody spots us, then..."

"Then we're just a pair of precocious sophomores who wanted to take their shot at finding the most mysterious party of the year?" Liz asked.

"Yeah." I sighed. "But first we need to get back to the wheels."

--------------

We'd been going in the right direction, but it was nearly an hour longer before Liz and I, tired and walking ata slow plod, caught a glimpse of some pickup truck heading down the road. A few minutes later, Liz nearly bumped into the Jeep before she spotted it in the dark.

We'd gotten onto a game of free association by then, so nothing was said beyond the back-and-forth of single word concepts as we both got into the front seats and drove back off. The game must have lasted for at least nine hundred turns, and finally ended when we spotted a Quick Stop at the side of the road. I parked in record time, and we both piled out to buy giant tumblers of gatorade and more snack food. (It had been a long day, much of it spent out in the desert without a lot of supplies available, especially drinkable supplies.

"So, how do you think Michael and Isabel are going to react to the news that we're back together again?" Liz asked as I entered town along the main road from the north.

"Umm -what do you mean?" I asked, playing it a bit too dumb.

"Come on, Max - they like me fine, well, Isabel does, but neither of your peoples are that wild about the idea of the two of us getting serious. Nobody said anything during the lost week, but I could tell. And - well, not trying to be mean about it, but I could see how Michael might feel like you were being hypocritical if you really came down on him about messing around with Michael during the heatwave."

"Oof. Trying to be mean or not, that does hurt." I sighed. "Because it's fair. But - well, is it hypocritical if your standards really have been changed by your circumstances. The reasons that I was - was concerned about Michael and Maria were the same ones, deep down, that made me back away from you, Liz. Now that you've sold me on us, I wouldn't give Michael any more grief about Maria - if either of them pursue the other again. I got the impression that whatever has happened between them, it's not still happening at the moment."

"Hmm." Liz took a long swallow of the gatorade. "Okay, that's fair. And it might be a good point to tell them about that up-front, but that would be your call."

"Yeah. As far as the rest of it - I don't know, I've never got any impression that Isabel disapproves of us, or approves either - at least, not since Marathon. She wasn't exactly wild about some of what I told her about - well, you know, right after you got shot. But it could be that she's better at keeping up a poker face for me than you, because she's known me for longer."

"That's an odd way to put it," Liz decided. "Usually greater familiarity and experience is supposed towork in favor of the perceiver, not the - the person who's trying not to give anything away, isn't it? Shouldn't you be better at seeing through her poker face than I, because you've known her for longer?"

"Normally, yeah, but I'm not sure if the usual rules apply to my sister," I admitted. "As far as Michael - well, he's been upset lately at things he was used to changing, and you and me being a couple would be a big change. I do think that if he was upset the week that you and I were dating, that was probably more to do with Indians and cave wall drawings than the status of our relationship."

"Could well be. And the two things could have reminded him of each other, since I was with you when River Dog showed you the cave wall."

"Yeah." I bit off half a twinkie in a single bite and turned the Jeep to the right, heading west towards the school now. "But he's going to have to get used to changes now, I guess."

"Certainly seems like it to me," Liz agreed.

Just at that point, her purse let out a chime, and Liz pulled out her little discount cell phone and consult the screen. "Two voice messages, five missed calls. All from my mom."

"Okay, so you're going to call her back," I said. It wasn't even really a question the way I said it, though I'm not sure why I didn't ask.

"No," Liz replied a little defensively. "I mean, I know that I should, but - but at this moment, it would be way too much like coming back to Earth. I'm not ready for that yet. I have a pretty good idea that she and my Dad are going to be over at your house tonight."

"Oh, really?" I said, slightly surprised. "Wait a second, doesn't the Crashdown cafe have some sort of private New Year's Eve party? I know that I saw a sign saying that they were closed this evening."

"Yeah, but it's for the old folk's home," Liz explained with a slightly regretful sigh. "They're back there by eleven, which does actually work out okay in that the staff can generally get to their own festivities by midnight, and come back to clean up on the morning of New Year's day, before opening again in the afternoon."

"Interesting," I said, and meant it. "I'm not so sure I like the idea of our parents getting together and comparing notes. I mean, I can only think of one reason why my mom would have invited the Parkers, and it suggests that she understands more about you and I than I thought."

"Just so long as you understand more about you and I than you did this morning," Liz said with a laugh, "I'll worry about our parents tomorrow."

------------

There was no sign of activity, Enigmatic or otherwise, when I pulled into the West Roswell High parking lot. A few other cars were in the parking lot, but for all that I knew, all of them could easily have been from the neighborhood residents, parking there because it was convenient while school was out for the Christmas holidays.

"What do you think?" Liz asked me after we'd sat there and 'cased the joint' for a few seconds. (If sitting in a vehicle and looking at a building qualifies as casing a joint - I'm not quite sure on the proper usage of that lingo.)

"Be careful, like always," I rattled off before even thinking much about it. "As it happens, I've actually thought a bit about how best to use my talents to enter the school after hours, just in case it ever turned out to be necessary - not that I was really thinking about a situation. East side doors are our best bet, right over there - the lock's a deadbolt, but that shouldn't be a problem for me, and the master security keypad is right there. You keep the door propped open until I re-arm the system, and then we slip in and stay well away from the external doors until we're ready to leave. I'll bypass the security entirely for that one. It's a good thing that only the outside doors and windows are wired in."

"Yeah, but reasonable," Liz agreed. "Wouldn't they have to secure all the classroom doors before locking up the school, if all of them were wired in?"

"Hmm - yeah, probably. Unless the security programming was very slick and could keep track of which internal doors were closed and which weren't, when the system was armed, and then just went into alarm if any of them opened or closed. That's probably not in the budget."

"Yeah." Liz reached for the door handle, and then paused to look back at me. "Are you sure that you can handle this, Max? Re-arming the system after we go in, and bypassing it when we come out, without leaving any significant trace or letting it phone home?"

"I'm sure," I insisted. "It's not that sophisticated a piece of hardware, and I've been practicing, a little. I wouldn't do it, not even for your sake and these photos, if I didn't think that we'd be safe."

"Alright then." Liz opened her door. "Let's do some crime."

-----------

Twenty minutes saw us both in the school photography club darkroom, with ABC Monitoring co. none the wiser that anybody had come to the school this particular New Year's Eve night. Actually, the darkroom is used by an actual for-credit photography class too, as well as the extracurricular group, so I'm not sure why I thought of the club first.

And even though it had been my idea, I really didn't have much of a clue how to use the darkroom equipment to develop negatives from the film on the camera and make prints of the pictures. It turned out that Liz had been in a summer-school photography class when she was in grade seven, (there's a program in town that has an emphasis on 'fun' summer school classes for pre-teens so that they're not underfoot at home all the time or out getting into more serious mischief,) and remembered all the steps very well. My job was pretty much to sit in the corner and make conversation when she didn't need to concentrate too hard on what she was doing.

"So, what about your friends, about Maria and Alex?" I asked her during one of those pauses, while the solution that she had mixed up was reaching the proper temperature. "And how they'd react to the news that we're together again, I mean."

"Well, there's no real way of knowing for sure until we see it for our own eyes, like the cat in the box," Liz commented, "but - well, Maria will be happy for us, I think. She just wants what's best for me, and ever since she heard about about what happened after we brought Michael back home, she's become convinced that I needed to fix what you screwed up or I'd regret it forever. As you guessed earlier this morning, it was her influence, her enthusiasm, and mostly her plan that brought you to my door." She sighed softly. "And I'm not sure if it was you or me who brought up the idea that she's probably sublimating her frustration at Michael into you and I, but..."

"I don't think I'd have thought of that in the first place, but you're probably right if you think so," I agreed. "What about Alex? I know that when we went out last time, he was still a little freaked about just having heard about us, and wasn't yet dealing very well. Has that situation improved at all, by the way? I had to sit through more than one earful from Isabel about the way he was behaving at the UFO Museum just before Michael collapsed and went blind - how he'd blurted out the wrong thing in front of Milton."

"Yeah, umm - I haven't been spending that much time with Alex," Liz admitted. "It'll take a little while for our friendship to heal, yet, though I think it's on the mend, and he's calmed down considerably himself. In fact, the last I heard from Alex was that he was trying to ignore the alien stuff, and just concentrate on his music as much as he could, and keeping his grades up, when the winter term starts up." She chuckled. "Which suggests that he might not be wild about my spending a lot of time with you, and even spend lest time with me, if he interprets ignoring the alien stuff as trying to just stay away from the people that he's found out are aliens. But - well, Alex is Alex, and I do know that I need to let him work through all of this stuff in the time and the way that he decides to himself. The last time any of us tried to push him, it didn't really work out too well."

"No, I guess not," I admitted. "Do you think that there might be more than the obvious going between Alex and Isabel, anyway?"

"Umm," Liz muttered, and I instantly realized that she needed to concentrate on what she was doing with the film, so I stayed silent. After a moment it became clear that she needed more from me than that. "Can you handle the lights?" she said, pointing over to the switches near the door of the darkroom."

"Yeah," I said, quickly getting up and pushing my chair over there. "Just say when. The cream switch turns off the regular lights, and the black one turns on the red light, right?"

"Yes, but DON'T," Liz blurted out. "Whatever you do, do not turn on the red light unless I tell you to, and I won't, not anytime soon." She was speaking very quickly but precisely, obviously needing to be sure that I understood this before the current stage of the process was done. Everything seemed to be completely dependent on timing - she had her watch propped up in front of her in stopwatch mode. "Even red light will ruin the film at this stage, before it's been completely fixed."

"Okay, okay, I understand," I said. "Or I think I do. I just cut the main lights and leave us in complete darkness?"

"Yeah, that's exactly it," Liz said. "I can do what I need to do by touch, and you're not up to anything important, are you?" I chuckled weakly, and Liz set down an open jar of photo chemicals on the table in front of her and picked up the camera. "Hit it."

I flipped the cream switch, and we were in darkness. Left my fingers on the switch for a few moments, trying to accustom my hand to that position for when I'd have to turn the main light back on, and then withdrew it so that I wouldn't need to worry about itchy fingers and a subconscious craving for light.

"Good." I couldn't see Liz's fingers working, but there was some kind of a faint clicking coming from over that side of the room, and it fit with what I'd expect of the back of the camera opening up. I didn't expect Liz to be too talkative, but once again she surprised me. "To get back to your question, I'm not entirely sure what's obvious to you, about Isabel and Alex."

"Umm - that he had a crush on her, along with a fair proportion of the guys going to this school, that she was willing to play on that to keep her secret, but that didn't work, and now that the truth is out..." I stalled momentarily, and could hear the faint sound of a miniscule amount of liquid flowing. "She doesn't seem sure if she wants to try and be friends or just go back to ignoring him."

"Oh, Max." Liz sighed. Another click. "We're sealed up tight again. Lights?" I turned the switch back on, and blinked a bit at the incandescent glare. "Is it possible that all guys, all over the galaxy or whatever, could be so entirely clueless?"

"What?" I protested faintly.

"Nuh-uh," she insisted. "I'm not going to explain this one to you. You're going to have to figure it out for yourself. That'll be good practice."

I grunted sourly and tried to change the subject. "What's the red light for, anyway, if you can't expose the film to it?"

"That's for the print paper, Max," Liz explained. "Black and white photo print paper is light-sensitive at the appropriate stage of the process too, but only to the blue-green spectra." She shook the little grey and black film canister as she answered. "The light that is shone through the negatives and focused on the print paper turns the white paper to black. That's a more complicated process that loading the film into a canister, and I guess you can make the paper selectively sensitive without throwing off the colors of the original pictures, because the paper just gets the same light that the negative has."

I smiled. "Okay, that makes sense. So how long until we have our negatives, and can start making prints."

"Ehh, five minutes or so." Liz cocked her head at me. "Are you impatient or something? We still have plenty of time before we go to the party at your place."

"Yeah, but I have another idea for spending some time together here at the school," I told her with a grin.

------------

Before Liz started to print the pictures, I left her in the darkroom and headed up to the second floor of the school. It was oddly creepy to be moving around the dark space, alone, at night - the middle distance seemed to be full of sounds that I couldn't quite make out, but I found what I'd been after and headed back downstairs with it. I knocked on the door of the darkroom once I got back to the photography classroom, but Liz didn't open the door for nearly ten minutes.

"Sorry, I thought that you understood when you said that you wanted to take a stretch and a look around," she explained. "Once I'd started the paper going, I couldn't open the door and let light in from the room outside without ruining it all."

"What light?" I asked her, a bit irritably.

"Even if the flourescents are turned off and it's dark outside, there's enough light coming in through the windows that - well, I'm not sure that it would be a problem, but I didn't want to take the chance. Sorry." Liz made a cute face that I probably wouldn't quite define as the classic 'puppy dog eyes' look, but it came pretty close.

"It's alright. So, are all the pictures done, then?" I asked, a smile spreading across my face because I didn't really want to fight it off that hard.

Pretty nearly. Just one more rinse, to make sure that they'll last okay and won't go bad over time in the air. You can help me out with that," Liz decided.

So help I did, and we packed the prints and the negatives away in one of the white craft envelopes that were stocked on the shelves just outside the darkroom, and cleaned up after ourselves as best we could. As I was washing my hands once the rest of the cleaning was all done, Liz stepped out into the room proper, took a look at one of the desks next to the windows, and chuckled. (I heard her chuckle, but I didn't see what I was looking at at the time. I could have guessed, but I've confirmed that with her since.)

"So, white or black?" I asked her, gesturing at the chessboard that I'd set up on the desk.

"You had to borrow from the chess club as well?" Liz asked, starting towards the seats on either side.

"Why not? As you said, we had some more time, the chess sets were here in the building with us, we're both pretty smart and I had a notion that you've played a bit before. I was curious who had the more logical mind."

"We're also both pretty competitive," Liz pointed out. "And we've only just reconciled our differences. Do you really think it's the best thing to put our egos up against each other head to head?"

"If we can't handle a single game with some sort of grace, then we probably shouldn't be dating," I pointed out.

"Okay, then - I'll be white, of course," Liz said, sitting down at the appropriate spot. "And I should warn you, I play a mean Queen's gambit."

"Bring it on," I insisted, sitting down on the Black side.

That game lasted nearly two hours, with a break in the middle to see if we could scavenge anything decent from the closed cafeteria, and in the end it came down to a black pawn supporting the black king, versus the lone white king who had lost the rest of his army by this point. I thought that I would be able win victory easily by getting my pawn to the white side of the board promoting it to a queen, and then using my new queen along with the black king to trap the white king, but Liz managed to slip the white King into a stalemate when I wasn't watching out for it. I stared at the position on the board in surprise and more than a little frustration. There was no legal move that Liz could make, but as I wasn't attacking her directly, it was a tie, not a win for my side. I felt an impulse to lose my temper, but controlled it - she'd gotten out of a tight spot in the only way she could, rather cleverly, and maybe it was good that the game had ended without a clear winner or loser.

"Thanks, sweetie," Liz told me when I shook her hand in gentlemanly fashion and expressed that sentiment. "And now, we'd better pack up the set, slip past the burglar alarm again, and make tracks across town. Our parents are probably starting to get twitchy by this point."

"Yeah, alright," I said, arranging my black pieces in their compartment of the box, and then picking up Liz's white king. "I'll put this back where I found it - you meet me at the East doors again.

"But don't touch them," Liz finished before I could even think of it. "Gotcha." And she blew me a kiss as I hurried away, which stopped me in my tracks. "Whoops - should I not have done that? Do I get another warning?"

I sighed to myself and hurried up the stairs again.

TO BE CONTINUED...

[Chrisken]

Part Five

Nobody saw Liz or I as we slipped in through the front door at around twenty-five minutes after eleven PM. The party was definitely in full swing, with Mister Guthro from Dad's office playing Beatles tunes on the synthesizer keyboard in the living room, while partiers from seven to seventy sang along, significantly more off-key than on. By the sources of other voices I could tell that there were two more large knots of party guests, in the downstairs den and the kitchen, and I tried to determine party strategy over the mangled strains of 'Yesterday.'

What did I want, now that we were here? Well, I wanted to see Isabel, Michael if he was around, relax a bit among any other friends who might be here, and have a chance to arrange my midnight kiss with Liz in some sort of privacy, away from the parentals. Where would Isabel and Michael go once my Mom's friends started to annoy them? Upstairs, no, that wasn't really Isabel's style, to hide in her room, (or mine,) and Dad wouldn't be happy if he caught her 'hiding' up there.

In the back yard. That had to be it.

Should we have gone around back in the first place? Maybe, but probably not, even if I'd thought of it then. There was time, and putting in a bit of parental face time - say, by passing through the kitchen on the way to the back door, was one of the ordeals that Liz and I really did need to go through, and probably better sooner than later. I led the way down the hall, and Liz followed.

It occured to me just before we got to the end of the hall that it might not really be worth the attention that we'd attract, (and the teasing, even if it would be parental and good-natured,) by appearing holding hands. So I turned to Liz, and stroked her cheek with my hand - (one thing about this whole 'no kissing until midnight' deal was it really helped me appreciate the intimacy and affection of almost any kind of touch,) and then brought my arm back to my side. Liz looked disappointed for just a moment, but she smiled - and when I walked into the kitchen, she was right behind me. It probably wasn't that much less obvious to anybody paying attention than the holding hands would have been.

"Max!" Somewhat to my surprise, neither of the two people who called my name were related to me - it was Mister and Missus Parker, who were sitting next to each other near the far end of the kitchen table, and - and Liz's father was in the middle of reaching out to pull a card from the board of a very old game, one I dimly recognized as involving the Knights of Camelot going out on missions that involved them doing battle with Dungeons and Dragons type wandering monsters. (Don't ask me about what sort of crazy focus group inspired that combination.)

And Liz was the next person to work up the nerve to speak. "Umm - hi Mom, hi Dad, nice to see you, sorry that I didn't... well, I didn't call you back, and I've been kinda vanished all day, but -- and I see that you remember my friend Max."

"Yes, I'm pretty sure that they do, Liz," my mom told her. "I'm glad that you made it here, how was your day?" I was looking around for my Dad, but he didn't seem to be in the kitchen, and - well, I'd have definitely recognized his voice even through the cacophony if he'd been one of the Beatles chorus. (My dad is one of the few people I know gifted with the ability to make a cacophony all by himself when he sings.) Maybe he was with the den crowd, or just in the bathroom, or off on some minor errand.

"I - well, I had a really good day, Missus Evans," Liz admitted. "I think that we both did."

"I'll want to hear all about it - in the morning," Mister Parker said.

"All about it?" I shot back in my best friendly joking tone. "Come on, sir, let us have a few secrets. We'll give you the important highlights."

"I think that's very considerate of you, Max," Liz's mother said, though her father didn't seem quite so impressed. "Umm, can I offer you a soda or some nog or anything?"

"Do we have cherry coke?" I immediately asked, and Liz said nearly the same thing in unison, except that she used 'you' instead of 'we' - the two of us looked at each other sidelong, and started laughing quietly. My mom shook her head, went over to the cooler at the other end of the table from the game board, and produced two soda cans with a design in bright cherry red against a darker burgundy.

"Thanks," Liz said, taking both of them and passing one to me. "So, umm - is Isabel around anywhere? I'd like to say hello."

"In the back yard," my mother said, with a tolerant smile. "Along with Michael, and some of their friends from school." That phrasing surprised me a little, but I didn't say anything about it. Michael doesn't exactly have any friends at school, except for Isabel and me, possibly Liz and Maria DeLuca - and he certainly doesn't get along with Isabel's popular 'friends.' I traded another look with Liz, and a few of the adults in the kitchen snickered. (Including Miz Ennis, who's been a friend of my mother's for about five years now.)

"You've done your necessary time, for the moment, you don't have to hang around here with us," Liz's mom said kindly. "Go on, say hi with the other kids."

"Alright - happy new year if we don't see you before then," Liz said, and nodded respectfully as she walked over to the back door - actually it's in the side of the house, but near the rear and close enough to the backyard to make it convenient that way. As I followed her out, Liz stopped for a second and held out her hand to me in silent entreaty, and I took it gladly enough. I'd have to make the score clear to my friends soon enough, and this was as good a way as any.

But as we stepped along the little passageway between the house and the garage, (or just as well, between the driveway and the back yard,) and our eyes adjusted, it became clear that one expected face was not there. There was Isabel, holding a small court with Tavia Swann from the cheerleading team and Rhonda Womack, who's not really part of her regular crowd, but a rich wannabe MBA type who's the daughter of the managing partner at Dad's firm, and it looked like the three of them were getting along well enough. Along the back wall, Don Flenson and Dwayne Steel were tossing a football back and forth - they're not teammates of Kyle's, just big guys from the autoshop crowd, and I suppose that if Michael had been given the opportunity to invite some guys along so that he wasn't too bored, they'd probably have made his list. But where was Michael himself??

"Hi, Isabel," Liz singsonged, feeling no fear at intruding on such exalted company as my sister and her friends tonight, "Where did Michael run off to? My parents seemed to think that he was out here with you."

"Hello, Liz," Isabel said to her with something between bored indifference and sincere friendliness. "Michael, he was making dirty jokes with the big boys back there, until he suddenly remembered somebody that he had to track down. Before midnight, if I guess right."

"Oh, interesting," I said. I hadn't let go of Liz's hand as she drew near the girls, and everybody seemed to be aware of it. I think that there was a little bit of a frown on Tavia's face - she flirts with me every chance she gets, and somehow I sensed that she wouldn't have minded taking Liz's place, but - well, Tavia's a stunning beauty, no arguing that, but in the time I've spent with her I've never got any sense of a connection between us beyond the purely superficial. Most teenage boys wouldn't care about that probably, but then again most boys don't have the kind of secrets and troubles in their life that I do in mine. When you think of how hesitant I was to really open up to Liz, considering all that we've shared, there's absolutely no question that I wouldn't let someone I didn't feel so close to into my life, even to the extent of casual dating - not just for the sake of pretty green eyes and a pair of C-cups.

Besides, once I saw into Liz's heart, there was no comparison. She's gorgeous too, not the kind of cheerleader prettiness that Tavia has, but Liz's inner and outer beauty add into something that certainly the entire squad couldn't match. Anyway, sorry about that ramble. I tried to get my head back onto the subject of what Isabel had last said - about Michael leaving a little while ago. "Say, Liz, do you happen to know what Maria's New Year's Eve plans are?"

"I'm not sure, she might be boycotting the whole thing, renting a movie with her mom and picking up pizza..." Oh, wasn't that an interesting mental movie, Michael coming to the DeLuca's door asking for Maria at midnight and Amy DeLuca's reaction, "...Or, actually, she had an invite from Tri-gon to come out to their symphonic soiree. I think that she was considering it."

"Oh, huh," I mumbled. Tri-gon is a local musical group, three girls who do blues-inspired a capella singing, and they're all local high schoolers - one junior from Roswell High, one junior and one senior from West Roswell. They've gathered some buzz and scored gigs all over the area, as far away as Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and I heard somebody, (maybe Isabel,) talking about the speculation that they'd soon be holding auditions for an understudy, to take over Monica Joelson's spot when she went away to college, because she'd gotten early admission to a performing arts schools somewhere in the midwest, maybe Chicago. And Liz had told me that Maria liked to sing - was she considering trying out for the group? And again, it would be a rather funny place for Michael to show up looking for her.

"Hey, Guerin split?" one of the guys, I think it was Dwayne, called over to us - and grunted softly as the little football bounced off his belly. "I didn't even notice, how about that."

"Pay some attention, Steel, I saw him take off," Don answered. "Maybe we should say our goodbyes too - we can try swinging by Amanda Kenson's slumber party a few minutes before midnight."

"Oh, good luck," Tavia called back sarcastically. Amanda was the cheerleading squad captain, and probably most of her guests were members.

"Thanks," Dwayne said, not catching the irony, and soon the guys had disappeared around the corner of the garage.

"Do you mind if we jet too, Isabel?" Rhonda asked her. "That is, if you want to come along with me, Tav."

"Umm - no, that's okay, and thanks," Isabel said. "I'll be fine."

"Did they mention heading off somewhere else?" Liz asked curiously as the girls departed as well, leaving only the three of us, conspirators all."

"Hmm?" Isabel considered that for a moment. "Maybe. I wasn't really paying attention to what they were talking about the whole time."

"Oh." Liz looked like she couldn't figure out what to say to that, which I rather understood.

"So, the two of you seem big with the - well, I suppose that holding hands isn't huge on the PDA scale, but it's more than you've indulged in for the last few weeks," Isabel said. "Can I assume that you're back together?"

"Umm, yeah," I told her, wondering what the rest of her reaction would be when it was confirmed.

"Yes!" Isabel nodded her head decisively. "Michael had better not welch on that twenty bucks, if he knows what's good for him."

"Okay," Liz drawled, caught by surprise, but grinning. "Listen, Isabel, while we've got you here alone, there's a few other things we need to tell you about. Important stuff about - well, about you-know-what. Today, Max and I, uhm..." She trailed off, not certain how to put this.

"Oh, lordy." Isabel leaned against the back wall of the house. "You met Nasedo, didn't you? And the two of you told him all about the rest of us, and..."

"No, no," I inisted, feeling somewhat relieved deep down. After this over-reaction, the truth would go over better - I hoped. "Not Nasedo, though it's something a bit similar. Liz and I - we found the suspended animation pods."

"What?" Isabel asked. "You mean, out in some cave in the desert??"

"Well, yes," Liz said, pulling out the white craft envelope. "We have proof, and a bit of a surprise. There were four pods in the - the chamber, not just three."

"Four?" Isabel exclaimed, reaching out to take the envelope but not looking inside. "Do you think that Nasedo was inside a pod too?"

"Not sure, but probably not," I whispered. "Somebody else, maybe, somebody that we haven't really heard of before now. Do - do you remember a little girl, with curly blond hair, maybe still inside her pod after we got out?"

Isabel seemed to be struck speechless by this idea, and then we were all distracted from the talk of pods. "Isabel! You've got a visitor in here," my mom's voice called from around the corner of the house. "I think that he wants to see you before midnight."

"I knew it!" Liz exclaimed. "Gotta be Alex."

"Oh, lord," Isabel rolled her eyes, not sounding extremely happy about the prospect, but she did lead the way back to the side door and past Mom into the house. Liz and I followed, not bothering to stop holding hands this time, even as we passed my my mother.

We were only just around the kitchen table when it all happened. "Isabel!" Alex's voice came from the living room, and then I spotted the gawky guy himself, around the edges of the Beatles crowd. He hurried towards the kitchen door, looking like he was determined to sweep my sister up in his arms and kiss her if she didn't happen to have any pepper spray on hand to repel him with, but he bumped into the wife of somebody from the firm on the way, making her spill her drink. "Sorry," Alex muttered, and continued on without hardly pausing.

He would have done better to pay more attention to the spilled eggnog, and not continued rushing at top speed over the spot where it had landed on the hardwood floor. Nog is very slippery, and I think that for at least a full send he was sliding along on that foot - and then natural friction reasserted himself, but Alex's balance had been thrown off just enough that he couldn't get his other foot down on the floor in time, and toppled forward, crashing onto the floor himself.

"Alex!" Isabel exclaimed, upset that this incident had all started for her sake, and more sympathetic to Alex's plight than I might have guessed she would be. "Are you okay?" she asked, kneeling down next to his shoulder.

"Umm, yeah, I'm good," Alex mumbled, turning his face around to face Isabel, while Liz and I hurried forward to help out if we could. "Feel a little skinned and scraped, but aside from that everything's fine."

"Ohh." Isabel reached out a hand, and Alex managed to push himself up on his side and take it.

"Three, two, one, HAPPY NEW YEAR!" The call seemed to be coming from the direction of the den, possibly the only place where Alex's sudden arrival hadn't distracted people from watching the clock as the final minutes ticked away. So suddenly Alex's predicament, and even Isabel, were dropped out of my mind as I turned back to Liz, realizing that the moment was upon us. I wanted to kiss her so badly - but couldn't quite work up the nerve, considering that this kiss had been the focus of everything that we'd been through all day - and the day had been a very hard one to top. There had been so much buildup to kissing her now, that I couldn't see that I could possibly live up to the buzz.

Liz seemed to share in the nervousness and anxiety, but she held one arm out in front of her, the forearm and hand pointing straight up, the palm facing to one side. "Make it a Palmer's kiss?" she said, giggling.

"What on earth?" I breathed, truly mystified about what even that phrase meant.

"Come on," she cajoled. "Haven't you EVER felt like Romeo to my Juliet, after all this? 'Palm to palm is holy palmers kiss?'" And that did ring a faint bell, of the phrase appearing in the midst of a passage of verse, and of the two young romantic leads (of a performance or a movie?) touching their hands in the same fashion that Liz was holding hers out, so as to avoid notice at a party or dance while their families were watching.

But as an actual suggestion, it was laughable, (partly because we'd already been touching like that through the day,) and served to goad me into action. Maybe that was what Liz had had in mind. "Forget that," I muttered, stepping in close, linking my arms around her waist, and she brought her hands around to hold on behind my shoulders. Feeling the need for some kind of theatricality, I dipped her body down as low as I could manage, as if we were ballroom dancing, (though there was no music, the faint strains of 'Help' having faded out with the midnight cheering and the rush of other couples to make their kisses,) and brought my lips to hers, in a sweet meeting that quickly became hot and passionate.

FLASH! Something of that old connection that had been between us before, but - but blocked, held in check all day as we tried to sort things out between ourselves, went into overdrive as the kiss deepened. I felt a rush of images flash through me, and knew that they weren't from Liz's mind or life alone, but from both of us, from what our lives could be now that they were together. Our destiny, if you want to use such a loaded word.

A glowing symbol, two curved lines coming out of a central blob. The galaxy icon, more or less as it showed on Isabel's Mesaliko pendant, but shining out of the ground in a forest clearing. And that same icon again, engraved on a metallic orb that looked like a small football.

The short, curly-haired blonde girl - I could tell for certain that it was the same one that I remembered from the pod chamber, but not as I'd seen her before - now a sassy teenager with attitude, fashionably dressed, quite beautiful in a way that still didn't hold a candle to Liz but was slightly more relatable than Tavia. Walking into the lunch courtyard in West Roswell High. And I could tell that Liz was with me in that glimpse of the future, that she was with me for all of this, in fact.

And one more moment, holding Liz in my arms and dancing, somewhere - where? Out to the side of a busy highway, well beyond the shoulder, maybe some kind of rest station parking lot, with cars ringing us nearly all the way around, and some music that I couldn't recognize playing. I couldn't tell why, but something about that scene was completely fufilling, as if the last thing that Liz and I needed to accomplish to be certain that we would spend the rest of our lives together had been well done. I saw Alex watching us dance, and Kyle Valenti - and that head full of curly blonde hair was leaning against Kyle's shoulder, eyes closed in sleep.

And then somebody cleared their throat strongly enough to snap me out of that vision, and Liz and I straightened up and stopped swapping saliva. Isabel bent over and kissed Alex on the cheek, and I looked over and saw that the kitchen clock was just about to make one minute after midnight.

"Happy millenium, everybody," I muttered.

"Actually, the millenium doesn't start until the END of the year 2000," Liz offered.

"Oh, don't start that one with me, Parker," Isabel grumbled.

I turned around to look at my mom, and was slightly surprised to see Dad next to her, though I can't think why in retrospect - they're still the kind of couple that makes a big deal about things like kissing at the New Year, even after so many years together. "Umm, I'm just going to go drive Liz home, and then I'll be off to bed."

"I do think that we can handle the ride, Max," Mister Parker said. "Though thank you for offering. And we'll see you tomorrow for lunch." He didn't make it sound like a question, but that was okay.

The way Liz Parker's love made me feel tonight, I could handle anything that her parents threw at me tomorrow. I touched my palm to hers, grinning, and felt the pleasant surge of energy go through me like electricity, and then her parents were hustling her off.

Until tomorrow.

I'd have wanted to go to bed right away and end the day on that high note, but Mom made me end the whole affair the way it had started.

With me cleaning. Sigh.

THE END.