All right! CampNano is on and the bunnies want to finish this story
dreamon, I'm following Roswell canon, where all the podsters are clones of their human donors and their royal counterparts. So, yeah, they're clones
Thank you guys for reading and reviewing! I miss this so much
Journal entry #25, September 3rd, 2011
How is it possible to be so close and yet so far away? How can Max be essentially free and still a prisoner of his body?
How can I be next to him, and yet unable to reach him?
How do I bring you back, Max?
Chapter Fifty-Three
Far Away
Max was not waking up.
He’d stopped destroying the lab twenty-three hours ago and then had fell into unconsciousness, which had been a relief right then, but as time went on, Liz had started to worry.
Questions plagued her: What if something seriously wrong was keeping Max from waking up? Or worse, what if he woke up just to demand to go back to the base? Or what if he lost control over his powers again, bringing the whole house down this time?
And then she would think about John. Was he still alive? Was he being drugged? What was she going to say to his wife if he never came back?
Round and round she went, hour after hour, watching the sunlight and the shadows chase each other through the basement’s narrow windows.
It was so absurd that she was thankful that the house wasn’t shaking anymore. She was also fighting a losing battle against sleep. She hadn’t slept for the better part of two days, and she’d already fallen asleep twice, waking up from nightmares too scary to contemplate. And yet Max was not waking up.
Anne Herschel had left to work on the formula from her actual lab. With half her basement lab in ruins and the possibility of Max finishing the job, she’d told Liz she had a better chance to finish at work. She’d warned Liz to leave the house as well, but Liz had argued she couldn’t just walk away from a sick man.
It won’t matter if you’re dead! Anne had argued, but before Liz could argue back, it had stopped. Max had stopped, and the silence that had followed had been full of dread.
Now, as she tiredly watched over him, she made sure his chest was rising and falling. As long as he was breathing, she could deal with this.
Besides, the silver lining in this whole nightmare was that Max wasn’t suffering.
She reached his forehead with tentative fingers and measured his temperature. He’d been running a low fever for hours, and she was seriously debating if she should try to wake him up and make him drink something. She nervously bit her lower lip.
How do I help you, Max? And what are you going to do when you wake up?
The doorbell rang on the first floor, and she ignored it. It was a small miracle that the neighbors hadn’t come to check out the house. Max had cracked the counters and broken dozens of test tubes and any glass-made equipment. She could only imagine how all of that must have sounded to the outside.
The door rang again, insistently this time.
She looked up, and wondered if the government had found them. She had absolutely no escape plan—no kind of plan whatsoever—beyond waiting for Max to wake up, and the thought paralyze her. If they had been found, then that was the end of it.
“Elizabeth Parker, you
better be in there!” Alex’s voice came muffled, and her heart soared. She got up in a hurry, ignoring her aching body, and threw the door open.
“Alex!”
He hugged her and she hugged him back, tears running down her face. She wanted to let go and properly greet him, but she couldn’t. Letting go of Alex was like letting go of a lifesaving vest. She held him tighter, and he didn’t complain.
“Hey…shh… It’s okay, we’re going to be fine,” he soothingly held her, placing his head over hers. She had no idea where to start, how to explain, not even how to be properly grateful to him. Having him here broke a dam that had threatened to break for hours now, but she didn’t have the luxury of falling apart when Max had already fallen ill.
Alex walked them into the house and closed the door.
“Okay, first things first: are you okay?” he asked, his eyes serious. She nodded, wiping out her tears with the back of her hands.
“Good. Is he okay?”
She shook her face, unable to find the words to elaborate.
“Not good,” he said out loud, shaking his head with hers. “Where’s John’s wife?”
“She’s—she’s at the lab,” she whispered, fresh tears coming down.
“She’s working on the cure?”
“She's making Max’s drug,” she answered, a little bit louder. “She went to her lab yesterday and hasn’t come back.”
“You’ve been all alone all this time? With Max?”
She nodded again, swallowing a sob. “I’m—I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m such a mess,” she apologized, furiously wiping more tears.
“Liz,” Alex said, holding her gently by the shoulders. “You’ve just been through hell, and a good part of it was Max’s fault. You have every right to be emotional right now.”
“Max is the one going through hell,” Liz protested, the familiar anger at the people who did this to Max bubbling up.
“That might be true, but it doesn’t diminish your own experiences in the least. You need to start thinking about you, Liz. Not because he doesn’t matter, but because you matter more, okay? You can’t help someone when you’re barely walking yourself.”
She nodded.
“Good. Now that we’ve established your priorities, how’s Max?”
“He had some reaction and started breaking things with—with his powers. And then he stopped. Just like that. He’s been unconscious since yesterday and now he’s running a low fever. He hasn’t moved ever since.”
“Okay, okay. I can deal with that. Now, you do look like a mess. You need to go lay down, eat something, take a shower, anything other than keeping watch over Max.”
“But what if he wakes up?”
“What about it?”
“What if he starts demanding going back to the base, or wakes up blasting his powers and hurts you?”
Alex raised his eyebrows, not amused. “Because you’re better at dealing with those scenarios than I am? If I remember correctly, I’m the one who called the base, and I’m the one who got you here. I think I can think of something, Liz. But you won’t be able to think about anything if you’re falling asleep on your own feet.”
She felt herself sagged. The idea of leaving Max scared her, but her more rational side told her that Alex was more than capable of dealing with this crisis.
Plus, Max is not going to puff out of existence without saying good-bye.
She shook her head at the thought.
“Okay,” she finally relented. “But if anything changes, anything at all—”
“I’ll wake you up. No problem. Now, go!”
She found a guest room and laid on the bed. For the longest moment, she thought she was not going to be able to let go and fall asleep. And then, she didn’t know a thing about the world for a long while.