Changes to Ch Ch Changes. CC M/L/K Teen. Complete
Posted: Sat Mar 25, 2006 11:48 am
Disclaimer: The characters of "Roswell" belong to Jason Katims, Melinda Metz, WB, and UPN. They are not mine and no infringement is intended.
I came across this while cleaning out my computer. I am sure it has been done several times over, and I am sure that it is a controversial subject to us all in that it further demonises Tess. I apologise about having too topics running here, the Roswellian Codex is a serial but this is free standing, so I post it as a one off. I have been really impressed reading various `retakes’ or `corrections’ to episodes, especially heavenly24’s reworking of the Alex story arch. The theory of the mind warp is certainly not unique to me, and will run and run.
Max, Liz and Kyle.
_______________________________________________________________________
Max drove fast down the empty road, his eyes fixed ahead, his stomach knotted and tense. The vast desert sky was quickly draining of colour, and the landscape was being unmade in the gathering darkness. Eventually he saw lights off the track, behind a copse of eucalyptus trees. Kyle was already there; pale, chewing his lip, with Liz sitting on the bonnet of his car. Max caught her in his headlights, as he swung off the road. He left the lights on after he killed the engine. He looked at Liz staring ahead. She looked withdrawn, like someone seriously ill, already disconnecting from those around her, concentrating on her own pain. He ran his hands over his face, through his thick, knotted hair. He must stay calm. He would be of no use to her if he continued to panic like this. He climbed out, nodding at them, and walked into the space between the two cars. It was a windy bleak spot, long used by Max and Michael to hide their alien artefacts in. Kyle looked about uneasily as the dusk fell as if the final departure of the sun had stirred up demons. The trees and bush grasses moaned and sighed, dust swirled and eddied about them. Liz came over with Kyle as if in a trance, and lay down without instruction. Max and Kyle crouched down. Max looked as if he was on the point of heaving.
`You ok?’ Kyle touched his leather jacket, making Max swing round, startled.
`Sure, Kyle. Let’s get on with this’ as he said this a series of luminous green threads laced over Liz’s abdomen, and caused her to flinch slightly. Kyle looked at Max urgently
`Ok, what are we doing again?’
`According to the book I can use the healing stones to amplify my powers, if we do that we might be able to wipe out whatever is happening inside of her’. As Max spoke he re-arranged the stones on the ground around Liz’s head, and placed his left hand just above her bare stomach. As he did this the threads of light started to jump the gap from her stomach to his hand, growing in brilliance.
`What can I do?’ Kyle leaned down, his hands on his knees, as if in prayer. He was suddenly aware of an enormous love for Liz, of desperately wanting her to be safe, and he was also aware of his feelings for the man just in front of him, complex, as yet unarticulated.
`Just stay back’ Max was lifting his hand up slowly like a necromancer. The light snapped and crackled, an electric current arching, spitting colour. Max felt his body radiating out energy.
He caught Kyle’s eye momentarily, before turning his entire attention to Liz. The green lights were rippling over her and then up into Max’s hand. The healing stones were pulsing yellow and golden light, emitting a curious modulating hum. Liz moaned and tensed. A small luminous ball of blue-white light appeared to come through her naval and then suddenly she started to levitate upwards. Max grunted and sighed as if he was carrying an immense weight, while Liz appeared to be in real pain, gritting her teeth and moving her head about.
`It hurts’ Max felt heat in his arm and flushing his face. He was profoundly aware of Liz within himself somehow, as though he could smell and almost taste her. Kyle had scrambled forward in response to Liz’s evident pain,
`No, stay back’ Max commanded `It’s ok Liz, take a deep breath, it won’t be for much longer’
`Max I can’t’. It was a plea, a strange animal like voice, hardly recognisable. `Stop!’ Max hesitated, Kyle moved forward, urgently. Kyle was gripping his hands together.
Liz cried out again as she lay hovering in mid air, Max labouring to keep in control `Just a little bit longer, it’s beginning to work I can feel it’. The brilliant florescent ball was almost in Max’s hand, but it was pulling Liz’s skin with it. Her pain was immense. He could sense it now. Kyle was hardly able to contain himself as Liz cried out again, a bestial, inhuman noise.
`Liz you just have to trust me’ Max could feel her energies now very close to him, on the very point of leaving her. But he could feel something else, a great vast blackness beneath her. He felt he was holding her over nothingness. He also felt someone else, a presence, someone who should not have existed, standing besides them, an imprint of something from Liz’s own mind. The reflected memory of someone – himself? – shocked Max, it was like suddenly meeting himself.
`I can’t take any more’ gasped Liz, and she brought left arm up as Max fought to physically separate the light from her. Suddenly there was a tremendous red flash all around, as if a large explosion had taken place and Max and Kyle were thrown backwards. Liz fell hard to the floor. They lay dazed for a moment before Max leaned forward, searching out Liz. For a moment he thought the process had worked, that Liz’s own balance had been restored through the stones, but as he came to his senses he saw Liz looking at him, changed still, lost to him.
`Stop hurting me, Max’ the words were cold, remote. She looked at him as if he was something cruel, purposeless. Her hatred winded him.
`I wasn’t trying to’ he needed to touch her, he needed one last chance before they were both utterly severed and swept apart. He moved forward, like a blind man crawling. Kyle, just behind, came forward as well. Liz moved away from them both.
`But you do, you always do’ Max stopped, his mind numbed, short of breath. Kyle, drawing along side saw in his face the look of someone almost fatally injured, casually, unexpectedly. Max went to say something, stopped, then he pressed forward to the retreating figure, his hand out stretched. Liz suddenly stopped, looking at him, her eyes expressionless. Frightened, Kyle felt unable to do or say anything. He felt sick to the core of his being.
`Why did you sleep with her’ Liz asked, and the question fell into the void between them. Max felt he had been physically struck in the face. `Why!’ It was a demand. He had not looked for this. He had not prepared himself, and yet at that moment all became clear to him, the most simplest of questions, answerless. His face emptied, tears streaming down his face. Kyle looked away, what in god’s name was happening?
`Every single time you speak of your son I am reminded of what you did to me, of how you were unfaithful, and how can you not know that? You’re doing this to me’ Max sat back, on his calves. He looked at her, and then slowly, he turned to look at Kyle. Kyle tried to recover his own sense of mental balance.
`Because you wanted me to, because…’ his voice sobbed away, his face in his hands, `because you made me think you had slept with Kyle!’ Slowly Kyle came forward, he was afraid to touch Max, afraid to break his word to Liz. He sat watching Max weeping, his shoulders moving in harsh jabs of pain. `Because I believed you were unfaithful to me Liz, against all my better judgement, I asked you three times to tell me the truth, but each time you repeated the lie’
`On the third occasion I told you the truth’ she whispered, `but by then it was too late, Tess had your child, she had killed Alex. You were leaving Earth’
`Even then I had to ask you, I had to ask the question. Why did you set me up with her in the first place – in Whittaker’s office. Remember!’ He was angry now, his pain burning through him like a great fire.
Kyle frowned, `Whittaker’s office?’
`Yes’ Max was almost shouting. `Having advised Tess what to wear and even what to read so I would show some interest in her, while all the time Liz spied on me from across the street!’
`Liz?’
`So she didn’t tell you? You were her final and successful attempt.’ Max’s spat the words, He turned again to Liz. `How can you ask me why, Liz? How dare you! You know why!’
`Hey guys, come on’ Kyle went to touch Max but he growled at him, spinning around violently, his deep brown eyes flared wide, `Keep away from me!’ The two young men starred at each other. Max saw bewilderment and fear. Kyle saw indescribable pain and confusion. Kyle but his hands up in a gesture of appeasement, and moved his eyes away first, back to Liz who was crying silently. He did not know this version of Max well.
`Why did we do it Liz, why did we set the whole thing going?’ Kyle spoke quietly, unsure of his voice, not sure he could control it. Max looked at each one of them in turn, incredulous. `What? She didn’t tell you why?’ Kyle turned away, distraught. `You faked sleeping with Liz and didn’t ask why?’ He went to grab Kyle’s jacket, but stopped short.
`Liz would not tell me, OK? I did it for her I guess, as a friend, she came to me for a favour, because I care for her as well Max’. Kyle fell silent, nauseous, the whole evening running away from him like a nightmare. `And I suppose I did it to get at you as well, Max.’ he said eventually, close to tears, complicit in the raw emotional pain about him, complicit in hurting two people he loved. `What the fuck are we doing to each other!’
`I did it because Max asked me to’ said Liz slowly, green lights radiating over her face. She looked at Max again intently, but the hatred had gone, in its place was a look of infinite sorrow. `You came back to me from the future and asked me to save you’.
________________________________-
They sat in a rough circle on the ground, the wind whispered about them. Beyond the arch of lights, the thick dark desert night shut them off from the world. Max had stopped crying and was sitting with his knees drawn up close to his chest, his arms bound around them as if cold. `I don’t understand, Liz. I don’t understand any of this’
`Max, you came to me from the future, from 2014, shortly after Michael and Isabel had been killed and the entire planet was on the verge of collapse to the Skins’ all the time she spoke she did not look up. She looked at the now darkened healing stones and, between them, her own imprint on the ground. `You had used the power of the Grenalith to transport yourself back in time to alter the future’. Max starred ahead, transfixed, `to stop the end of the world’
`That’s how you knew about the power of the Grenalith.’ Max said eventually, `That’s why you warned me to keep it hidden as I left for the summit’. Kyle – utterly lost by these new revelations – was squatting on his haunches. `Max came to you from the future? Why?’
`Max and I became too attached to each other’ Liz continued, `We became inseparable. We eloped when we were 19 and we were married…’
`In Vegas’ Max whispered, a grim smile on his lips, the imprints of memory he had seen while trying to heal Liz were opening out in his mind like compressed files on a computer`then what I saw was true – in the Elvis Chapel’
`Wait, the Elvis Chapel?’ stammered Kyle. `You saw yourself get married?’
`When we went to Vegas with Michael and the others I had a flash, a vision, of myself and Liz getting married. It must have been an echo from the alternative timeline that Liz ended when she put me with Tess and not with herself’ Tears started again, like a reopened wound. `Oh my god Liz’
`But how would putting Tess and Max together save the planet?’ pleaded Kyle.
`The Max from the future, Future Max, told me that the four of them were a unit, complete, that they had been sent together for a purpose. When Max refused to embrace his destiny and pair himself with Tess, she left Roswell, and when the Skins attacked you were all defeated, we were all defeated. In order to prevent Tess leaving, I had to break up with Max.
`Why didn’t he go to Tess?
He came to the only person he loved and trusted’ Max moaned, his hands hard across his face.
`Jesus!’ Kyle shook his head in disbelief. `That is the weirdest thing I have ever heard. But Tess betrayed you all – did she betray you in the alternative version as well?’
`I don’t know. It makes no sense now. My life makes no sense, Max. In that time line Alex was alive, he came to our wedding, and in changing the time line I killed him…..’
`Tess killed Alex’ said Kyle firmly, `Tess killed him. And if Alex was alive at your wedding he would have died with the rest of us in 2012 or whenever’
`But in driving you and Tess together I helped her betray you. Don’t you see that now!! All along she wanted your child to take back to Antar and I gave her that opportunity by rejecting Max – she saw his face at the window that night, she saw his soul shatter into a thousand points of light and then watched as each one winked out into utter darkness. She started to weep as well.
`Liz you saved our lives’ cut in Max, `whatever happened, you saved our lives. It doesn’t matter now’‘
`It does Max, it does. I am totally lost in this now. I need to find myself again, without you for the moment. I need to figure out what is happening to me’
`Liz, please. We can sort this out’ if he lost her again he would die. Without her everything was worthless, it meant nothing.
`I need to sort this out on my own. I longed to tell you Max, god I longed to. But I was never sure it was right, or that you knowing would not in some way restore the time line that leads to the end of the us all’
`That time at the school with the fire’ Max was thinking out loud, `Tess destroyed all of the skins herself. I was on the point of telling Nicholas were the Grenalith was’, Again the grim smile, `I think the moment of our crisis has passed’
`I need to go away from here, from Roswell, to figure this out for myself’
A silence fell, deepened by the vast desert and the sky. They sat in a place full of their mystery, the location of the pod chamber, the ruins of the ship. Max rocked slowly back and forth. Liz was silent, her head down. Only Kyle sat alert, his mind racing, and his imagination on the point of exploding. Quietly, definitively, he said `Wait, it was a mind warp’.
`What?’ Max looked at him, bracing himself. He saw the images from Liz again, calling them up.
`Tess mind warped you, Liz. She made you see Future Max, to further her plan’. Kyle had their attention now. He was both horrified and excited.
`You came to see Tess one night, can you remember? It was just before you asked me to fake sleeping with you. I was pissed because I was just about to jump her bones, you offered to help here then? he stopped. Max looked up, who shook his head slowly. `Help her get with Max’
`She was ranting about how she had not asked to be Max’s mate and that she was on the point of leaving them all and going off –
`Oh god’ Max crashed his head against his knees several times. `Oh god’
`What is it?’ Liz and Kyle asked simultaneously
`When I came to your window, when I heard you and Kyle laughing and then saw you’ even now, recalling the memory was painful. `I went and sat in the park and Tess was there. She was always there when I was vulnerable. Later at the Observatory when I had lost everyone, when I had abandoned you all and above all else, abandoned Alex, she was always there, she was always waiting for me. And she was with us in Vegas, she was with you Liz, outside the Chapel, playing pin ball'
`So I guess you never got married after all' sighed Kyle, picking stones and throwing them off into the night. `What a bitch! It just gets worse and worse, she was remorseless!'
Liz lowered her head. Relief, anguish, all mixed together. `She manipulated all of us’
`No’ said Max, `she didn’t succeed in manipulating you, in the end you won, we won. In the end, we can be together Liz. Please, don't shut me out.’
Cold silence. It was late night, the stars above brilliant, seeing all and saying nothing. They each held their separate thoughts.
`Max I need to leave you for a while, I need to go and find myself’ she spoke calmly now. Kyle looked at them both.
`Will you come back to me?’ asked Max quietly.
Liz arose slowly and walked towards Kyle’s car. Max placed his head on his knees, his face crumpled in pain. Kyle sat helplessly watching. He eventually reached out and just touched Max’s shoulder,
`Max.’ For a moment Kyle feared that Max would twist away, that all the old enmity had been reopened between them. He could not bear that. Yet as he had gone to stand, Max had turned into him, his arms opening up to hug him. Kyle could smell the leather of his coat, the flesh warmth of his face, exaggerated by the chill night air `take her home, Kyle.’
I came across this while cleaning out my computer. I am sure it has been done several times over, and I am sure that it is a controversial subject to us all in that it further demonises Tess. I apologise about having too topics running here, the Roswellian Codex is a serial but this is free standing, so I post it as a one off. I have been really impressed reading various `retakes’ or `corrections’ to episodes, especially heavenly24’s reworking of the Alex story arch. The theory of the mind warp is certainly not unique to me, and will run and run.
Max, Liz and Kyle.
_______________________________________________________________________
Max drove fast down the empty road, his eyes fixed ahead, his stomach knotted and tense. The vast desert sky was quickly draining of colour, and the landscape was being unmade in the gathering darkness. Eventually he saw lights off the track, behind a copse of eucalyptus trees. Kyle was already there; pale, chewing his lip, with Liz sitting on the bonnet of his car. Max caught her in his headlights, as he swung off the road. He left the lights on after he killed the engine. He looked at Liz staring ahead. She looked withdrawn, like someone seriously ill, already disconnecting from those around her, concentrating on her own pain. He ran his hands over his face, through his thick, knotted hair. He must stay calm. He would be of no use to her if he continued to panic like this. He climbed out, nodding at them, and walked into the space between the two cars. It was a windy bleak spot, long used by Max and Michael to hide their alien artefacts in. Kyle looked about uneasily as the dusk fell as if the final departure of the sun had stirred up demons. The trees and bush grasses moaned and sighed, dust swirled and eddied about them. Liz came over with Kyle as if in a trance, and lay down without instruction. Max and Kyle crouched down. Max looked as if he was on the point of heaving.
`You ok?’ Kyle touched his leather jacket, making Max swing round, startled.
`Sure, Kyle. Let’s get on with this’ as he said this a series of luminous green threads laced over Liz’s abdomen, and caused her to flinch slightly. Kyle looked at Max urgently
`Ok, what are we doing again?’
`According to the book I can use the healing stones to amplify my powers, if we do that we might be able to wipe out whatever is happening inside of her’. As Max spoke he re-arranged the stones on the ground around Liz’s head, and placed his left hand just above her bare stomach. As he did this the threads of light started to jump the gap from her stomach to his hand, growing in brilliance.
`What can I do?’ Kyle leaned down, his hands on his knees, as if in prayer. He was suddenly aware of an enormous love for Liz, of desperately wanting her to be safe, and he was also aware of his feelings for the man just in front of him, complex, as yet unarticulated.
`Just stay back’ Max was lifting his hand up slowly like a necromancer. The light snapped and crackled, an electric current arching, spitting colour. Max felt his body radiating out energy.
He caught Kyle’s eye momentarily, before turning his entire attention to Liz. The green lights were rippling over her and then up into Max’s hand. The healing stones were pulsing yellow and golden light, emitting a curious modulating hum. Liz moaned and tensed. A small luminous ball of blue-white light appeared to come through her naval and then suddenly she started to levitate upwards. Max grunted and sighed as if he was carrying an immense weight, while Liz appeared to be in real pain, gritting her teeth and moving her head about.
`It hurts’ Max felt heat in his arm and flushing his face. He was profoundly aware of Liz within himself somehow, as though he could smell and almost taste her. Kyle had scrambled forward in response to Liz’s evident pain,
`No, stay back’ Max commanded `It’s ok Liz, take a deep breath, it won’t be for much longer’
`Max I can’t’. It was a plea, a strange animal like voice, hardly recognisable. `Stop!’ Max hesitated, Kyle moved forward, urgently. Kyle was gripping his hands together.
Liz cried out again as she lay hovering in mid air, Max labouring to keep in control `Just a little bit longer, it’s beginning to work I can feel it’. The brilliant florescent ball was almost in Max’s hand, but it was pulling Liz’s skin with it. Her pain was immense. He could sense it now. Kyle was hardly able to contain himself as Liz cried out again, a bestial, inhuman noise.
`Liz you just have to trust me’ Max could feel her energies now very close to him, on the very point of leaving her. But he could feel something else, a great vast blackness beneath her. He felt he was holding her over nothingness. He also felt someone else, a presence, someone who should not have existed, standing besides them, an imprint of something from Liz’s own mind. The reflected memory of someone – himself? – shocked Max, it was like suddenly meeting himself.
`I can’t take any more’ gasped Liz, and she brought left arm up as Max fought to physically separate the light from her. Suddenly there was a tremendous red flash all around, as if a large explosion had taken place and Max and Kyle were thrown backwards. Liz fell hard to the floor. They lay dazed for a moment before Max leaned forward, searching out Liz. For a moment he thought the process had worked, that Liz’s own balance had been restored through the stones, but as he came to his senses he saw Liz looking at him, changed still, lost to him.
`Stop hurting me, Max’ the words were cold, remote. She looked at him as if he was something cruel, purposeless. Her hatred winded him.
`I wasn’t trying to’ he needed to touch her, he needed one last chance before they were both utterly severed and swept apart. He moved forward, like a blind man crawling. Kyle, just behind, came forward as well. Liz moved away from them both.
`But you do, you always do’ Max stopped, his mind numbed, short of breath. Kyle, drawing along side saw in his face the look of someone almost fatally injured, casually, unexpectedly. Max went to say something, stopped, then he pressed forward to the retreating figure, his hand out stretched. Liz suddenly stopped, looking at him, her eyes expressionless. Frightened, Kyle felt unable to do or say anything. He felt sick to the core of his being.
`Why did you sleep with her’ Liz asked, and the question fell into the void between them. Max felt he had been physically struck in the face. `Why!’ It was a demand. He had not looked for this. He had not prepared himself, and yet at that moment all became clear to him, the most simplest of questions, answerless. His face emptied, tears streaming down his face. Kyle looked away, what in god’s name was happening?
`Every single time you speak of your son I am reminded of what you did to me, of how you were unfaithful, and how can you not know that? You’re doing this to me’ Max sat back, on his calves. He looked at her, and then slowly, he turned to look at Kyle. Kyle tried to recover his own sense of mental balance.
`Because you wanted me to, because…’ his voice sobbed away, his face in his hands, `because you made me think you had slept with Kyle!’ Slowly Kyle came forward, he was afraid to touch Max, afraid to break his word to Liz. He sat watching Max weeping, his shoulders moving in harsh jabs of pain. `Because I believed you were unfaithful to me Liz, against all my better judgement, I asked you three times to tell me the truth, but each time you repeated the lie’
`On the third occasion I told you the truth’ she whispered, `but by then it was too late, Tess had your child, she had killed Alex. You were leaving Earth’
`Even then I had to ask you, I had to ask the question. Why did you set me up with her in the first place – in Whittaker’s office. Remember!’ He was angry now, his pain burning through him like a great fire.
Kyle frowned, `Whittaker’s office?’
`Yes’ Max was almost shouting. `Having advised Tess what to wear and even what to read so I would show some interest in her, while all the time Liz spied on me from across the street!’
`Liz?’
`So she didn’t tell you? You were her final and successful attempt.’ Max’s spat the words, He turned again to Liz. `How can you ask me why, Liz? How dare you! You know why!’
`Hey guys, come on’ Kyle went to touch Max but he growled at him, spinning around violently, his deep brown eyes flared wide, `Keep away from me!’ The two young men starred at each other. Max saw bewilderment and fear. Kyle saw indescribable pain and confusion. Kyle but his hands up in a gesture of appeasement, and moved his eyes away first, back to Liz who was crying silently. He did not know this version of Max well.
`Why did we do it Liz, why did we set the whole thing going?’ Kyle spoke quietly, unsure of his voice, not sure he could control it. Max looked at each one of them in turn, incredulous. `What? She didn’t tell you why?’ Kyle turned away, distraught. `You faked sleeping with Liz and didn’t ask why?’ He went to grab Kyle’s jacket, but stopped short.
`Liz would not tell me, OK? I did it for her I guess, as a friend, she came to me for a favour, because I care for her as well Max’. Kyle fell silent, nauseous, the whole evening running away from him like a nightmare. `And I suppose I did it to get at you as well, Max.’ he said eventually, close to tears, complicit in the raw emotional pain about him, complicit in hurting two people he loved. `What the fuck are we doing to each other!’
`I did it because Max asked me to’ said Liz slowly, green lights radiating over her face. She looked at Max again intently, but the hatred had gone, in its place was a look of infinite sorrow. `You came back to me from the future and asked me to save you’.
________________________________-
They sat in a rough circle on the ground, the wind whispered about them. Beyond the arch of lights, the thick dark desert night shut them off from the world. Max had stopped crying and was sitting with his knees drawn up close to his chest, his arms bound around them as if cold. `I don’t understand, Liz. I don’t understand any of this’
`Max, you came to me from the future, from 2014, shortly after Michael and Isabel had been killed and the entire planet was on the verge of collapse to the Skins’ all the time she spoke she did not look up. She looked at the now darkened healing stones and, between them, her own imprint on the ground. `You had used the power of the Grenalith to transport yourself back in time to alter the future’. Max starred ahead, transfixed, `to stop the end of the world’
`That’s how you knew about the power of the Grenalith.’ Max said eventually, `That’s why you warned me to keep it hidden as I left for the summit’. Kyle – utterly lost by these new revelations – was squatting on his haunches. `Max came to you from the future? Why?’
`Max and I became too attached to each other’ Liz continued, `We became inseparable. We eloped when we were 19 and we were married…’
`In Vegas’ Max whispered, a grim smile on his lips, the imprints of memory he had seen while trying to heal Liz were opening out in his mind like compressed files on a computer`then what I saw was true – in the Elvis Chapel’
`Wait, the Elvis Chapel?’ stammered Kyle. `You saw yourself get married?’
`When we went to Vegas with Michael and the others I had a flash, a vision, of myself and Liz getting married. It must have been an echo from the alternative timeline that Liz ended when she put me with Tess and not with herself’ Tears started again, like a reopened wound. `Oh my god Liz’
`But how would putting Tess and Max together save the planet?’ pleaded Kyle.
`The Max from the future, Future Max, told me that the four of them were a unit, complete, that they had been sent together for a purpose. When Max refused to embrace his destiny and pair himself with Tess, she left Roswell, and when the Skins attacked you were all defeated, we were all defeated. In order to prevent Tess leaving, I had to break up with Max.
`Why didn’t he go to Tess?
He came to the only person he loved and trusted’ Max moaned, his hands hard across his face.
`Jesus!’ Kyle shook his head in disbelief. `That is the weirdest thing I have ever heard. But Tess betrayed you all – did she betray you in the alternative version as well?’
`I don’t know. It makes no sense now. My life makes no sense, Max. In that time line Alex was alive, he came to our wedding, and in changing the time line I killed him…..’
`Tess killed Alex’ said Kyle firmly, `Tess killed him. And if Alex was alive at your wedding he would have died with the rest of us in 2012 or whenever’
`But in driving you and Tess together I helped her betray you. Don’t you see that now!! All along she wanted your child to take back to Antar and I gave her that opportunity by rejecting Max – she saw his face at the window that night, she saw his soul shatter into a thousand points of light and then watched as each one winked out into utter darkness. She started to weep as well.
`Liz you saved our lives’ cut in Max, `whatever happened, you saved our lives. It doesn’t matter now’‘
`It does Max, it does. I am totally lost in this now. I need to find myself again, without you for the moment. I need to figure out what is happening to me’
`Liz, please. We can sort this out’ if he lost her again he would die. Without her everything was worthless, it meant nothing.
`I need to sort this out on my own. I longed to tell you Max, god I longed to. But I was never sure it was right, or that you knowing would not in some way restore the time line that leads to the end of the us all’
`That time at the school with the fire’ Max was thinking out loud, `Tess destroyed all of the skins herself. I was on the point of telling Nicholas were the Grenalith was’, Again the grim smile, `I think the moment of our crisis has passed’
`I need to go away from here, from Roswell, to figure this out for myself’
A silence fell, deepened by the vast desert and the sky. They sat in a place full of their mystery, the location of the pod chamber, the ruins of the ship. Max rocked slowly back and forth. Liz was silent, her head down. Only Kyle sat alert, his mind racing, and his imagination on the point of exploding. Quietly, definitively, he said `Wait, it was a mind warp’.
`What?’ Max looked at him, bracing himself. He saw the images from Liz again, calling them up.
`Tess mind warped you, Liz. She made you see Future Max, to further her plan’. Kyle had their attention now. He was both horrified and excited.
`You came to see Tess one night, can you remember? It was just before you asked me to fake sleeping with you. I was pissed because I was just about to jump her bones, you offered to help here then? he stopped. Max looked up, who shook his head slowly. `Help her get with Max’
`She was ranting about how she had not asked to be Max’s mate and that she was on the point of leaving them all and going off –
`Oh god’ Max crashed his head against his knees several times. `Oh god’
`What is it?’ Liz and Kyle asked simultaneously
`When I came to your window, when I heard you and Kyle laughing and then saw you’ even now, recalling the memory was painful. `I went and sat in the park and Tess was there. She was always there when I was vulnerable. Later at the Observatory when I had lost everyone, when I had abandoned you all and above all else, abandoned Alex, she was always there, she was always waiting for me. And she was with us in Vegas, she was with you Liz, outside the Chapel, playing pin ball'
`So I guess you never got married after all' sighed Kyle, picking stones and throwing them off into the night. `What a bitch! It just gets worse and worse, she was remorseless!'
Liz lowered her head. Relief, anguish, all mixed together. `She manipulated all of us’
`No’ said Max, `she didn’t succeed in manipulating you, in the end you won, we won. In the end, we can be together Liz. Please, don't shut me out.’
Cold silence. It was late night, the stars above brilliant, seeing all and saying nothing. They each held their separate thoughts.
`Max I need to leave you for a while, I need to go and find myself’ she spoke calmly now. Kyle looked at them both.
`Will you come back to me?’ asked Max quietly.
Liz arose slowly and walked towards Kyle’s car. Max placed his head on his knees, his face crumpled in pain. Kyle sat helplessly watching. He eventually reached out and just touched Max’s shoulder,
`Max.’ For a moment Kyle feared that Max would twist away, that all the old enmity had been reopened between them. He could not bear that. Yet as he had gone to stand, Max had turned into him, his arms opening up to hug him. Kyle could smell the leather of his coat, the flesh warmth of his face, exaggerated by the chill night air `take her home, Kyle.’