Reconstructing Madonna - Part Eight
Hey la! I'm really trying to just get caught up with this already, so - mebbe another one or two posts today? Also, I'll be posting a few of my drabbles for the 50ficlets challenge soon, so my LJ is going to be flooded for the next day or so. That will all change as soon as I get caught up with Madonna, and promptly have nothing else to do. Anyway, enjoy. :)
Chapter Seven here.
Part Eight
Max.
And the measly flashes she remembers are nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to this.
Every pore in her skin opens to accept the lingering feel of his presence. He is around her, inside of her. Holding her without touch.
Her eyes search for him but find only the media-populated parking lot.
For a moment this troubles her. Why, when he is so obviously here, is he nowhere to be seen? How can she feel him so deeply if it’s only her?
(And it’s amazing, because for the first time in years, it doesn’t really feel like just her.)
One nearby reporter’s loud words drift her way, and her ears ring with the strain of trying to catch them.
“… the hospital is not releasing their security footage at this point in time. An inside source says that all five recipients - four children and one infant - have an enigmatic silver handprint on their chests. What this signifies…”
Silver handprint.
Hospital.
Children.
Things start to make sense. (As much sense as they can, anyway, when her stomach is melting and her blood is singing and everything is so much sharper, brighter, better than before.)
Disappointment edged in bitterness almost overwhelms her - because of course she’s missed him, of course he’s long gone. Chasing after something she no longer recognizes.
He’ll never really be with her again.
This knowledge makes her panic, whole body tensed and still. Breathing becomes a luxury she won’t indulge in, and her eyes are squeezed tightly shut against the barrage of camera lights twenty feet away.
She’s so scared, so terrified that one step in the wrong direction and this miracle/curse of a flash will all be over. It has none of the pure strength that her connection to Max carries.
Because this isn’t pure at all.
(Pure died a long time ago, she thinks.)
It’s harsh and intense and so shadowed by her own anxiety that it threatens to die out completely at any given moment. Even the feeling she’s come to equate with Max has changed, grown darker. (And of course it has, because she’s gotten darker, too.)
There’s a taste like metal on her tongue and her hands are shaking like crazy and she just can’t bring herself to brush at the tears falling on her cheeks. She’s worried she’d chase this feeling away with the dampness, and after so long without him she’s not going to let him fade into nothingness just yet.
This is more than she’s had of him for six years. Six years where she hid and let everything fester. Six years where he made no move to find her.
But Liz thinks that this, strangely, is more of him than she’s ever had.
How very breakable this tentative thread bridging her to him is. And her mind is screaming at her to relax; to concentrate; to hold on; because if she so much as blinks he’ll disappear.
That could happen even if she does everything right.
Maybe, a tiny voice advises her, you should stop wasting this and enjoy it while it lasts.
So she does.
Like an addict given their choice of poison, Liz lets herself become immersed in the illusion of Max’s presence, perfectly content to ride out wave after wave of euphoria. It is everything she could hope for and more.
He is wonderful and warm and so three-dimensional she feels like all of his secrets are laid out at her feet.
She doesn’t reach for any one thing. Gets the deep of him regardless.
(So much gentleness and strength and passion, and from a soul that’s actually let the damage heal over. She’s glad, so glad, that he at least has remembered that that’s possible.)
At the core he’s exactly the same.
Still wondrously perfect in all his faults. All the parts of him ruined and shoddily patched back together, but somehow the better for it.
She could happily sink into him until she’s drowning.
Even though Liz knows she shouldn’t, realizes she doesn’t have the right to, she clamors for more.
The breath leaves her chest when she gets it.
Images -
Max, falling to the ground in this same spot, crying tears that make hers seem small and insignificant.
Sensation -
Asphalt cutting into her knees. A hand on her back, and someone’s voice guiding her away from the madness and back into life. She’s not sure why this is making her throat ache.
And then, feeling.
Inadequacy. Grief. Some strange, sad, joy she can’t get a handle on - and home, her: the two things only really one.
It’s an undertow of the best and worst emotions she’s ever come across. Liz feels herself going under and is helpless to stop it.
Limbs numbed. Head close to exploding.
And her heart - what’s left of it, at least - is breaking.
Because even with all the good, the bad is damn near suffocating her.
She doesn’t want anymore. She’d sell her soul to be connected to him again, but not like this.
Never like this.
Seeing him broken, a shell of the person he used to be. Feeling what he goes through every time he does this amazing, wonderful thing and knowing that if he’s not careful, one of these days he’s going to kill himself because he tries too hard.
Knowing there’s nothing she can do to help.
That his pain is partly (mostly) her fault to begin with.
She doesn’t want it.
But it comes all the same.
Then the sightlessness retreats and she’s viewing something else.
People, this time - the faces of the ones he healed here, she thinks.
Four bald and sallow children; and he sees the beauty in them where most people can only count the casualties of their disease. Leaning over them, one hand resting tenderly on their foreheads as he gets inside their skin and wages battle against the sickness threatening to kill them. Leaving them new and whole, but coming away a little more broken and so insanely tired.
There’s also a baby.
She knows this baby - Emma. Remembers placing a cool hand on her mother’s neck late one night and softly making a promise that she would be fine. (Because when Liz touches Emma sometimes she sees snippets of birthday parties, home videos, and first days of school.)
And then Liz sees the last face.
Finally understands why all she hears right now is Max’s ongoing wail.
And it’s amazing - she actually feels her mind frantically trying to shut down.
Feels all the grief, helplessness, and love gone to waste (and she has no idea, really, if these are Max’s feelings or her own) creep away like so many grains of sand under a tidal wave.
But even while her mind is trying to push it all back, one instinctive emotion is rising to the forefront, drawing on the strength of all the others and building into something black and obscene that threatens to cleave her in half.
Then her teeth are clenching to hold back her enraged cry.
“Beth! Beth, what’s wrong?!”
Shanna, clueless but knowing she should be worried. And Liz wonders why she hasn’t noticed her until now, and how long she’s been standing here nearly comatose.
The older woman’s voice is her reminder to check her hands. Liz quickly pulls her sleeves over her balled fists at the sight of the signature tendrils of electricity. Thanks No One and Nothing that it wasn’t spotted.
For once her powers don’t hurt enough to distract her from the swell of emotions rushing through her.
She wonders how the hell she’ll be able to make it to the corner before she unleashes herself on something.
It never enters her mind to stay. She doesn’t have a death wish (yet).
“I can’t be here.”
And whose voice is this, she wonders dizzily, because it’s definitely not hers. It’s panicked even when she is furious, breaking off and grating at her until even more tears are building behind her eyes.
She can’t confront this voice, much less the person to whom it belongs.
Shanna is asking for an elaboration or an answer - she’s not sure. The older woman’s words shift and turn in on themselves before they reach her ears. She simply shakes her head three times, muddling everything irredeemably and longing for escape. She doesn’t have the energy for something more.
“Liz, what--”
“Tell them I’m sorry,” she says, still using someone else’s voice. She hopes she didn’t just quit her job.
Liz walks away swiftly. Wants to break into a run, but is still too shaky.
She’s not sure she’ll ever be able to run again.
But she tries not to be too resentful. It’s a miracle she can walk at all.
-
“Jesus Christ, Liz!”
Eileen jumps up from the barstool just as the door hits the wall with a resounding crack.
Liz’s whole body trembles.
She mentally crosses her arms over her stomach, trying to drift off to a place where this isn’t as painful. Where the guilt doesn’t eat her alive.
Try as she might, she can’t find that place or any like it.
Liz distantly hears Eileen’s exclamation. Just like her preoccupied mind distantly takes in the honest-to-God terror on her friend’s face and the remnants of the picture frames that fell apart when hitting the floor.
So much splintering and shattering hardly fazes her anymore.
She’ll fix it later. She fixes everything later.
(Maybe, she thinks, too late.)
She can’t hold it in a second more. “Get back in the kitchen,” she instructs harshly. Voice low and controlled, strained from the effort to not seem threatening or cruel.
Eileen complies without argument.
Her protective instinct satisfied, Liz lifts her hand.
That simple action is enough to annihilate their couch.
(Eileen was sitting there earlier. And maybe, if she had still been there a minute ago, she’d be dust now, too.)
Liz hasn’t needed a joint this badly in years.
Like most bad feelings, the power discharges continue in short, violent spasms.
After the couch it’s the entertainment center. Then the large mirror hanging in the hallway.
The walls all take a scorching, but thankfully don’t catch on fire.
Each destroyed target lodges in her mind, enlarging to fill her eyes until her chilling handiwork is all she can see.
When she’s done she falls unsteadily to the floor. Draws her knees to her chest and rocks back and forth, because the compact motion sometimes helps.
She feels like a monster.
Safety in the form of her best friend is suddenly enveloping her.
Warm, strong arms drawing her worn body close until she’s warm, too. She finds a place to rest her head and, exhausted but finally safe, lets her eyelids droop.
Silky hair tickles her cheek, and for some reason the sensation makes her want to sneeze.
Then that droll, slightly nasally voice that Liz knows like her own. She grasps onto the edges of it and hangs on, treating it like the lifeline it is. “I called Serena. She’ll be here soon, okay?”
They’re both shaking. Eileen more than Liz.
“Okay,” Liz whispers. Half for herself, half for her friend. Her voice is still scratchy, but now it’s even weaker than before.
She’s so much weaker.
“Babe, what happened?”
Eileen, unlike Serena, never uses endearments. This one makes Liz burrow even harder into her shoulder.
Whimpers bubble up in her throat.
“I’m not strong enough to do this.”
The body supporting her stiffens.
“I’m trying. So hard… but I just - I keep on making it worse. I just can’t do it anymore.”
That persistent curiosity that often characterizes her best friend is lost in the face of this. She doesn’t squirm or start to question Liz only to stop. She is just there. Ignoring the details in favor of the big picture.
But the big picture is so fucked up that Liz isn’t sure all the help in the world will make much of a difference anymore.
“Yes, you can. Liz, I know it’s hard. I’m right here with you, remember? I know. But you are so much stronger than you’re giving yourself credit for.”
She wishes so fiercely that those words made any kind of difference.
They lie on the floor together, Eileen’s unnoticed tears making wet patches in Liz’s hair and Liz’s whole body still as death.
“Serena will be here soon,” Eileen repeats. With the boundless faith of a little sister, the kind that never completely disappears, she presses forward. “Rena will be here soon, okay? And she’ll know what to do. She’s going to fix this, Liz.”
She doesn’t respond.
Just lays there, head mashed into the soft skin of her best friend’s shoulder, too shaken to move and too terrified to close her eyes.
-
Serena, as it turns out, isn’t fixing much of anything.
Liz doesn’t make her nocturnal visits to Serena’s apartment very often. But when she does, the pain and the fear and the guilt are so bad that she’s willing to take just about any advice to get it to recede.
What she feels right now is a million times worse. And if she’s normally locked inside her head, now she’s on a different plane altogether.
In full-on doctor mode, Serena crouches in front of her. There’s a safe distance between them, not wide enough to be cold and not close enough to be suffocating. She’s saying something in a soothing tone, and Liz is hearing none of it.
A sudden thought hits her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers meekly. She keeps her head ducked so she won’t have to look either of them in the eye. Seeing their innocent confusion right now is more than she can take.
“Liz, please. You’ve been blowing up our furniture for years and I’ve never once gotten pissed. Why would now be any different?”
Eileen, blunt as ever. Not anywhere near as well-informed as she usually is.
Liz thinks this must be what Max felt like. Wonders if, for Michael and Isabel’s sake, he ever regretted saving her life.
She doesn’t regret it. But she also didn’t save anyone.
It’s so cold.
Serena murmurs something to Eileen, and Liz makes out the word ‘shock’. In seconds a blanket is being smoothed around her shoulders. It trembles under the contractions of her shoulders and back.
A startling memory of warmth is seared in her mind.
“Max.”
The word is out before she has time to think it through. She finally raises her eyes, and her friends look at her in varying degrees of shock.
There’s no going back now. “He was at the hospital. It must have been yesterday or last night, because there were all these news cameras when we drove up. I stepped out of the car and I… felt… him.” She sounds less affected than she is. “He was there to heal people.”
Eileen snorts. Serena pales.
“That’s impossible. What happened to ‘lay low’ and ‘don’t draw attention to us’?” the younger of the two queries.
Even in her somber mood, Liz can’t help the wry smile that flits across her lips. “I think that went out the window when we started robbing convenience stores.”
“Did anyone ask you any questions?” Serena asks.
Her voice is odd. Quiet.
She shakes her head. “I - I connected with him.” Exhaling furiously, she shakes her head. A troubled frown mars her brow. “Which is just impossible, because even with my premonitions I need to be touching someone. And he wasn’t even there.”
For the first time in years she feels like more than an animated corpse. She’s always at her best when she’s hiding behind a puzzle.
“Oh my God. They’re here? All of them, or just Max? Is the bitch with him?”
Eileen fires questions off right and left, forgetting that she’s supposed to be treating Liz like finely spun glass at the moment.
Normally Liz would be glad for this. Right now, though, she doesn’t want to think about what she felt.
All the empty spaces Max filled up. All the new holes ripped into her before he was done.
Serena cuts through the interrogation with foreign sharpness. “You can’t go into work for the next few days. And we need to clean up the apartment before anyone notices anything out of place.”
Liz listens to her friend’s haphazard planning and wonders why this feels like a group of teenagers trying to cover up a murder.
She finds herself growing frightened because her best friend is frightened.
Realizes with mute panic that Max isn’t here to catch her this time.
“And, I don’t know, I don’t want us to act too abnormally, but you shouldn’t leave the building either. We can tell everyone you have the flu, or -”
“I want to find him.”
They look at her with horror-filled eyes for a second, then speak at the same time.
“Liz, he’s probably already moved on by now -”
“Absolutely not.”
She’s confused.
Eileen is trying to reason with her? Serena is giving her orders?
Even odder than Serena’s refusal is the stinging wound it leaves on Liz.
Shivers wrack her body and she pulls the blanket tighter.
“He’s somewhere close by. For some reason, he felt like it was safe to do this - and he might have information we need to know. He can help us. Help me.”
The truth is so close to the surface, but she hesitates to speak it. Recognizes herself as a hypocrite and contradiction of the highest order for even thinking it.
In the end it demands to be voiced. “He might need me.”
“What about what you need, Liz?” Eileen’s green eyes glint intensely. “You put everything on the line for him time and again and didn’t get so much as a ‘thank you’ for it. You’re still struggling to put yourself back together.”
“Yes, and that’s my fault! From the beginning all that Max has ever done is save me. And I’ve been selfish and stupid and just ruined the best part of my life. And I left him. He was lonely and wounded and he needed me and I… I left.”
How is it possible that it’s both easier and harder to breathe?
“But he never tried to follow you.”
Liz stares at Serena. Wonders dully where her psychologist, much less her best friend, has disappeared to.
Because her words may say that he never went after her but her face is saying that she’s not worth going after at all.
The part of her that has been splintering since the night at the hospital last week ruptures. Tears fill her eyes.
It hasn’t been this difficult to find her voice since that last year in Roswell when everyone but Maria started looking at her without really seeing. “That’s not important. What I need to focus on right now is whether or not Max -”
“Don’t, Liz. Just - don’t.” Serena’s eyes are glassy with some sprawling emotion Liz can’t make herself examine too deeply. “You’re so desperate for control, and you - you try to pretend it’s because you want everything to be justified and rational, but you never, ever make your decisions with a clear head. It’s not your fault that we were made a part of this, and I have never blamed you for that or regretted knowing about you. But this is our decision, too. You don’t have the right to decide this on your own.”
“I -”
“Damn it, Liz! For once, just once, will you actually listen to me?!”
The tears won’t fall.
Eileen crosses the floor and stands beside her, glaring at her older sister. Drawing a line in the sand. “Jesus, Serena,” she hisses. Tries to enfold Liz in a hug.
Liz shrugs her off.
Shocked and bewildered and hurt. Angry that this person she trusts more than she trusts herself is shining a light on all of her flaws and insecurities and knowing that Serena’s words are more truthful than she even knows.
And she wonders, is this what she’s always thought of me?
Her steps to the door are wooden, but her hand is whisper-soft as she steps into the hall and closes it behind her.
-
“Hail Mary, full of grace -”
Liz listens numbly as the woman three pews ahead of her recites the Rosary. She’s already been through the Doxology, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostle’s Creed.
Small, almost unnoticeable rivers of calm wash against her.
So many words, with no real meaning by themselves - and yet, somehow they’re enough to keep the hole in her chest from spreading outward and tearing her in two.
It’s amazing that for all the word changes and translations, all the vastly different mouths to give them life, the actual prayers never change.
She’s glad for that.
Even the soothing atmosphere keeping her powers at bay can’t fully distract her from the reason she’s been running. From the argument with Serena and from the memories, of Max and of him, that brought it about.
It was stupid.
She knew that. Knew it when the thought was just a wordless, frightening idea in the back of her head. Knew it when she started making provisions for things like covering her tracks and getting custody of a baby that might or might not one day exhibit powers.
Knew it when she snuck into the nursery and made the connection.
But somehow, that eternally optimistic part of her that still hasn’t managed to die completely argued that it could work.
She could heal him. She could take care of him.
She could love him.
(After all, didn’t she already?)
“- the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women-”
The encounter can easily be likened to someone with a balance problem heading straight into a minefield.
Liz had read the reports. Hell, she was the one writing most of them. But nothing could have prepared her for actually seeing the damage.
Nothing could have prepared her for how much pain he was in.
Just one lonely, forgotten baby.
The mother is five months into a ten-year prison sentence - Liz doesn’t even want to know what for. There’s a better chance of locating a needle in a haystack than finding a father. And the woman’s family didn’t even come to the hospital.
Infants are brimming over with life and possibilities - and she would know, because she sees most of it. But she never saw anything from him. That should have been all the warning she needed.
Just one lonely, forgotten baby who never had a chance anyway.
“- and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
But she tried. Dear God did she try. She spent the better part of an hour in trance-like concentration, sweat sliding down her face and warning pain invading the back of her head.
In the end it didn’t even make a difference.
She hugs herself as she remembers him, lying in his incubator with only a hospital-regulation blanket.
So little. So beautiful.
So… fragile.
She despises herself for not being strong enough.
And she knows deep down in her bones - knows like she’s only known a few things in her short life - that it’s her fault Max couldn’t save him, either.
Liz isn’t sure what she did. She was so careful with him, so sure not to try anything that could hurt him.
But she did something wrong. She must have, because she refuses to believe that such an awful, heartbreaking eventuality could have come into existence on its own merits and without the help of some outside force.
Despite their fight, it’s Serena’s voice sounding in her ear, so soft and logical it’s amazing she’s not sitting on the bench beside her.
He had a mother, Liz. A mother who chose to get herself into that situation and who was taking narcotics like a replacement for prenatal vitamins. There was a physician in the prison who could have foreseen this if he’d been paying careful enough attention. There were other people -
No. No.
All of it - the miniature corpse resting in the hospital morgue; the veracity of Max’s tears - all of it is because of her.
“Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”
She ruins everything.
“No wonder he wanted the queen.”
“Tell me, how does it feel to kill your best friend?”
“LIIIIIZ!”
She hides behind her hands. Stifles sobs as ugly as the thoughts and feelings causing them.
Suddenly the tiny chapel feels more like a prison.
The stained glass depiction of the Madonna stares at her, judging and finding her wanting.
Always wanting.
She rises unsteadily to her feet, ignoring the concerned stare of the parish priest. She needs to get home before Eileen and Serena’s anxiety turns into panic. And she needs to figure out what she’s going to do about Max.
Ignoring him isn’t an option. If it was only guilt for the past fueling her thoughts, she might be able to hold out. But it’s more than that. It’s the knowledge that he’s near to her, has been breathing the same air, and is suffering just as much as she is.
Running away is probably out, too.
Because with her luck, she’d only wind up running to him.
Chapter Seven here.
Part Eight
Max.
And the measly flashes she remembers are nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to this.
Every pore in her skin opens to accept the lingering feel of his presence. He is around her, inside of her. Holding her without touch.
Her eyes search for him but find only the media-populated parking lot.
For a moment this troubles her. Why, when he is so obviously here, is he nowhere to be seen? How can she feel him so deeply if it’s only her?
(And it’s amazing, because for the first time in years, it doesn’t really feel like just her.)
One nearby reporter’s loud words drift her way, and her ears ring with the strain of trying to catch them.
“… the hospital is not releasing their security footage at this point in time. An inside source says that all five recipients - four children and one infant - have an enigmatic silver handprint on their chests. What this signifies…”
Silver handprint.
Hospital.
Children.
Things start to make sense. (As much sense as they can, anyway, when her stomach is melting and her blood is singing and everything is so much sharper, brighter, better than before.)
Disappointment edged in bitterness almost overwhelms her - because of course she’s missed him, of course he’s long gone. Chasing after something she no longer recognizes.
He’ll never really be with her again.
This knowledge makes her panic, whole body tensed and still. Breathing becomes a luxury she won’t indulge in, and her eyes are squeezed tightly shut against the barrage of camera lights twenty feet away.
She’s so scared, so terrified that one step in the wrong direction and this miracle/curse of a flash will all be over. It has none of the pure strength that her connection to Max carries.
Because this isn’t pure at all.
(Pure died a long time ago, she thinks.)
It’s harsh and intense and so shadowed by her own anxiety that it threatens to die out completely at any given moment. Even the feeling she’s come to equate with Max has changed, grown darker. (And of course it has, because she’s gotten darker, too.)
There’s a taste like metal on her tongue and her hands are shaking like crazy and she just can’t bring herself to brush at the tears falling on her cheeks. She’s worried she’d chase this feeling away with the dampness, and after so long without him she’s not going to let him fade into nothingness just yet.
This is more than she’s had of him for six years. Six years where she hid and let everything fester. Six years where he made no move to find her.
But Liz thinks that this, strangely, is more of him than she’s ever had.
How very breakable this tentative thread bridging her to him is. And her mind is screaming at her to relax; to concentrate; to hold on; because if she so much as blinks he’ll disappear.
That could happen even if she does everything right.
Maybe, a tiny voice advises her, you should stop wasting this and enjoy it while it lasts.
So she does.
Like an addict given their choice of poison, Liz lets herself become immersed in the illusion of Max’s presence, perfectly content to ride out wave after wave of euphoria. It is everything she could hope for and more.
He is wonderful and warm and so three-dimensional she feels like all of his secrets are laid out at her feet.
She doesn’t reach for any one thing. Gets the deep of him regardless.
(So much gentleness and strength and passion, and from a soul that’s actually let the damage heal over. She’s glad, so glad, that he at least has remembered that that’s possible.)
At the core he’s exactly the same.
Still wondrously perfect in all his faults. All the parts of him ruined and shoddily patched back together, but somehow the better for it.
She could happily sink into him until she’s drowning.
Even though Liz knows she shouldn’t, realizes she doesn’t have the right to, she clamors for more.
The breath leaves her chest when she gets it.
Images -
Max, falling to the ground in this same spot, crying tears that make hers seem small and insignificant.
Sensation -
Asphalt cutting into her knees. A hand on her back, and someone’s voice guiding her away from the madness and back into life. She’s not sure why this is making her throat ache.
And then, feeling.
Inadequacy. Grief. Some strange, sad, joy she can’t get a handle on - and home, her: the two things only really one.
It’s an undertow of the best and worst emotions she’s ever come across. Liz feels herself going under and is helpless to stop it.
Limbs numbed. Head close to exploding.
And her heart - what’s left of it, at least - is breaking.
Because even with all the good, the bad is damn near suffocating her.
She doesn’t want anymore. She’d sell her soul to be connected to him again, but not like this.
Never like this.
Seeing him broken, a shell of the person he used to be. Feeling what he goes through every time he does this amazing, wonderful thing and knowing that if he’s not careful, one of these days he’s going to kill himself because he tries too hard.
Knowing there’s nothing she can do to help.
That his pain is partly (mostly) her fault to begin with.
She doesn’t want it.
But it comes all the same.
Then the sightlessness retreats and she’s viewing something else.
People, this time - the faces of the ones he healed here, she thinks.
Four bald and sallow children; and he sees the beauty in them where most people can only count the casualties of their disease. Leaning over them, one hand resting tenderly on their foreheads as he gets inside their skin and wages battle against the sickness threatening to kill them. Leaving them new and whole, but coming away a little more broken and so insanely tired.
There’s also a baby.
She knows this baby - Emma. Remembers placing a cool hand on her mother’s neck late one night and softly making a promise that she would be fine. (Because when Liz touches Emma sometimes she sees snippets of birthday parties, home videos, and first days of school.)
And then Liz sees the last face.
Finally understands why all she hears right now is Max’s ongoing wail.
And it’s amazing - she actually feels her mind frantically trying to shut down.
Feels all the grief, helplessness, and love gone to waste (and she has no idea, really, if these are Max’s feelings or her own) creep away like so many grains of sand under a tidal wave.
But even while her mind is trying to push it all back, one instinctive emotion is rising to the forefront, drawing on the strength of all the others and building into something black and obscene that threatens to cleave her in half.
Then her teeth are clenching to hold back her enraged cry.
“Beth! Beth, what’s wrong?!”
Shanna, clueless but knowing she should be worried. And Liz wonders why she hasn’t noticed her until now, and how long she’s been standing here nearly comatose.
The older woman’s voice is her reminder to check her hands. Liz quickly pulls her sleeves over her balled fists at the sight of the signature tendrils of electricity. Thanks No One and Nothing that it wasn’t spotted.
For once her powers don’t hurt enough to distract her from the swell of emotions rushing through her.
She wonders how the hell she’ll be able to make it to the corner before she unleashes herself on something.
It never enters her mind to stay. She doesn’t have a death wish (yet).
“I can’t be here.”
And whose voice is this, she wonders dizzily, because it’s definitely not hers. It’s panicked even when she is furious, breaking off and grating at her until even more tears are building behind her eyes.
She can’t confront this voice, much less the person to whom it belongs.
Shanna is asking for an elaboration or an answer - she’s not sure. The older woman’s words shift and turn in on themselves before they reach her ears. She simply shakes her head three times, muddling everything irredeemably and longing for escape. She doesn’t have the energy for something more.
“Liz, what--”
“Tell them I’m sorry,” she says, still using someone else’s voice. She hopes she didn’t just quit her job.
Liz walks away swiftly. Wants to break into a run, but is still too shaky.
She’s not sure she’ll ever be able to run again.
But she tries not to be too resentful. It’s a miracle she can walk at all.
-
“Jesus Christ, Liz!”
Eileen jumps up from the barstool just as the door hits the wall with a resounding crack.
Liz’s whole body trembles.
She mentally crosses her arms over her stomach, trying to drift off to a place where this isn’t as painful. Where the guilt doesn’t eat her alive.
Try as she might, she can’t find that place or any like it.
Liz distantly hears Eileen’s exclamation. Just like her preoccupied mind distantly takes in the honest-to-God terror on her friend’s face and the remnants of the picture frames that fell apart when hitting the floor.
So much splintering and shattering hardly fazes her anymore.
She’ll fix it later. She fixes everything later.
(Maybe, she thinks, too late.)
She can’t hold it in a second more. “Get back in the kitchen,” she instructs harshly. Voice low and controlled, strained from the effort to not seem threatening or cruel.
Eileen complies without argument.
Her protective instinct satisfied, Liz lifts her hand.
That simple action is enough to annihilate their couch.
(Eileen was sitting there earlier. And maybe, if she had still been there a minute ago, she’d be dust now, too.)
Liz hasn’t needed a joint this badly in years.
Like most bad feelings, the power discharges continue in short, violent spasms.
After the couch it’s the entertainment center. Then the large mirror hanging in the hallway.
The walls all take a scorching, but thankfully don’t catch on fire.
Each destroyed target lodges in her mind, enlarging to fill her eyes until her chilling handiwork is all she can see.
When she’s done she falls unsteadily to the floor. Draws her knees to her chest and rocks back and forth, because the compact motion sometimes helps.
She feels like a monster.
Safety in the form of her best friend is suddenly enveloping her.
Warm, strong arms drawing her worn body close until she’s warm, too. She finds a place to rest her head and, exhausted but finally safe, lets her eyelids droop.
Silky hair tickles her cheek, and for some reason the sensation makes her want to sneeze.
Then that droll, slightly nasally voice that Liz knows like her own. She grasps onto the edges of it and hangs on, treating it like the lifeline it is. “I called Serena. She’ll be here soon, okay?”
They’re both shaking. Eileen more than Liz.
“Okay,” Liz whispers. Half for herself, half for her friend. Her voice is still scratchy, but now it’s even weaker than before.
She’s so much weaker.
“Babe, what happened?”
Eileen, unlike Serena, never uses endearments. This one makes Liz burrow even harder into her shoulder.
Whimpers bubble up in her throat.
“I’m not strong enough to do this.”
The body supporting her stiffens.
“I’m trying. So hard… but I just - I keep on making it worse. I just can’t do it anymore.”
That persistent curiosity that often characterizes her best friend is lost in the face of this. She doesn’t squirm or start to question Liz only to stop. She is just there. Ignoring the details in favor of the big picture.
But the big picture is so fucked up that Liz isn’t sure all the help in the world will make much of a difference anymore.
“Yes, you can. Liz, I know it’s hard. I’m right here with you, remember? I know. But you are so much stronger than you’re giving yourself credit for.”
She wishes so fiercely that those words made any kind of difference.
They lie on the floor together, Eileen’s unnoticed tears making wet patches in Liz’s hair and Liz’s whole body still as death.
“Serena will be here soon,” Eileen repeats. With the boundless faith of a little sister, the kind that never completely disappears, she presses forward. “Rena will be here soon, okay? And she’ll know what to do. She’s going to fix this, Liz.”
She doesn’t respond.
Just lays there, head mashed into the soft skin of her best friend’s shoulder, too shaken to move and too terrified to close her eyes.
-
Serena, as it turns out, isn’t fixing much of anything.
Liz doesn’t make her nocturnal visits to Serena’s apartment very often. But when she does, the pain and the fear and the guilt are so bad that she’s willing to take just about any advice to get it to recede.
What she feels right now is a million times worse. And if she’s normally locked inside her head, now she’s on a different plane altogether.
In full-on doctor mode, Serena crouches in front of her. There’s a safe distance between them, not wide enough to be cold and not close enough to be suffocating. She’s saying something in a soothing tone, and Liz is hearing none of it.
A sudden thought hits her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers meekly. She keeps her head ducked so she won’t have to look either of them in the eye. Seeing their innocent confusion right now is more than she can take.
“Liz, please. You’ve been blowing up our furniture for years and I’ve never once gotten pissed. Why would now be any different?”
Eileen, blunt as ever. Not anywhere near as well-informed as she usually is.
Liz thinks this must be what Max felt like. Wonders if, for Michael and Isabel’s sake, he ever regretted saving her life.
She doesn’t regret it. But she also didn’t save anyone.
It’s so cold.
Serena murmurs something to Eileen, and Liz makes out the word ‘shock’. In seconds a blanket is being smoothed around her shoulders. It trembles under the contractions of her shoulders and back.
A startling memory of warmth is seared in her mind.
“Max.”
The word is out before she has time to think it through. She finally raises her eyes, and her friends look at her in varying degrees of shock.
There’s no going back now. “He was at the hospital. It must have been yesterday or last night, because there were all these news cameras when we drove up. I stepped out of the car and I… felt… him.” She sounds less affected than she is. “He was there to heal people.”
Eileen snorts. Serena pales.
“That’s impossible. What happened to ‘lay low’ and ‘don’t draw attention to us’?” the younger of the two queries.
Even in her somber mood, Liz can’t help the wry smile that flits across her lips. “I think that went out the window when we started robbing convenience stores.”
“Did anyone ask you any questions?” Serena asks.
Her voice is odd. Quiet.
She shakes her head. “I - I connected with him.” Exhaling furiously, she shakes her head. A troubled frown mars her brow. “Which is just impossible, because even with my premonitions I need to be touching someone. And he wasn’t even there.”
For the first time in years she feels like more than an animated corpse. She’s always at her best when she’s hiding behind a puzzle.
“Oh my God. They’re here? All of them, or just Max? Is the bitch with him?”
Eileen fires questions off right and left, forgetting that she’s supposed to be treating Liz like finely spun glass at the moment.
Normally Liz would be glad for this. Right now, though, she doesn’t want to think about what she felt.
All the empty spaces Max filled up. All the new holes ripped into her before he was done.
Serena cuts through the interrogation with foreign sharpness. “You can’t go into work for the next few days. And we need to clean up the apartment before anyone notices anything out of place.”
Liz listens to her friend’s haphazard planning and wonders why this feels like a group of teenagers trying to cover up a murder.
She finds herself growing frightened because her best friend is frightened.
Realizes with mute panic that Max isn’t here to catch her this time.
“And, I don’t know, I don’t want us to act too abnormally, but you shouldn’t leave the building either. We can tell everyone you have the flu, or -”
“I want to find him.”
They look at her with horror-filled eyes for a second, then speak at the same time.
“Liz, he’s probably already moved on by now -”
“Absolutely not.”
She’s confused.
Eileen is trying to reason with her? Serena is giving her orders?
Even odder than Serena’s refusal is the stinging wound it leaves on Liz.
Shivers wrack her body and she pulls the blanket tighter.
“He’s somewhere close by. For some reason, he felt like it was safe to do this - and he might have information we need to know. He can help us. Help me.”
The truth is so close to the surface, but she hesitates to speak it. Recognizes herself as a hypocrite and contradiction of the highest order for even thinking it.
In the end it demands to be voiced. “He might need me.”
“What about what you need, Liz?” Eileen’s green eyes glint intensely. “You put everything on the line for him time and again and didn’t get so much as a ‘thank you’ for it. You’re still struggling to put yourself back together.”
“Yes, and that’s my fault! From the beginning all that Max has ever done is save me. And I’ve been selfish and stupid and just ruined the best part of my life. And I left him. He was lonely and wounded and he needed me and I… I left.”
How is it possible that it’s both easier and harder to breathe?
“But he never tried to follow you.”
Liz stares at Serena. Wonders dully where her psychologist, much less her best friend, has disappeared to.
Because her words may say that he never went after her but her face is saying that she’s not worth going after at all.
The part of her that has been splintering since the night at the hospital last week ruptures. Tears fill her eyes.
It hasn’t been this difficult to find her voice since that last year in Roswell when everyone but Maria started looking at her without really seeing. “That’s not important. What I need to focus on right now is whether or not Max -”
“Don’t, Liz. Just - don’t.” Serena’s eyes are glassy with some sprawling emotion Liz can’t make herself examine too deeply. “You’re so desperate for control, and you - you try to pretend it’s because you want everything to be justified and rational, but you never, ever make your decisions with a clear head. It’s not your fault that we were made a part of this, and I have never blamed you for that or regretted knowing about you. But this is our decision, too. You don’t have the right to decide this on your own.”
“I -”
“Damn it, Liz! For once, just once, will you actually listen to me?!”
The tears won’t fall.
Eileen crosses the floor and stands beside her, glaring at her older sister. Drawing a line in the sand. “Jesus, Serena,” she hisses. Tries to enfold Liz in a hug.
Liz shrugs her off.
Shocked and bewildered and hurt. Angry that this person she trusts more than she trusts herself is shining a light on all of her flaws and insecurities and knowing that Serena’s words are more truthful than she even knows.
And she wonders, is this what she’s always thought of me?
Her steps to the door are wooden, but her hand is whisper-soft as she steps into the hall and closes it behind her.
-
“Hail Mary, full of grace -”
Liz listens numbly as the woman three pews ahead of her recites the Rosary. She’s already been through the Doxology, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostle’s Creed.
Small, almost unnoticeable rivers of calm wash against her.
So many words, with no real meaning by themselves - and yet, somehow they’re enough to keep the hole in her chest from spreading outward and tearing her in two.
It’s amazing that for all the word changes and translations, all the vastly different mouths to give them life, the actual prayers never change.
She’s glad for that.
Even the soothing atmosphere keeping her powers at bay can’t fully distract her from the reason she’s been running. From the argument with Serena and from the memories, of Max and of him, that brought it about.
It was stupid.
She knew that. Knew it when the thought was just a wordless, frightening idea in the back of her head. Knew it when she started making provisions for things like covering her tracks and getting custody of a baby that might or might not one day exhibit powers.
Knew it when she snuck into the nursery and made the connection.
But somehow, that eternally optimistic part of her that still hasn’t managed to die completely argued that it could work.
She could heal him. She could take care of him.
She could love him.
(After all, didn’t she already?)
“- the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women-”
The encounter can easily be likened to someone with a balance problem heading straight into a minefield.
Liz had read the reports. Hell, she was the one writing most of them. But nothing could have prepared her for actually seeing the damage.
Nothing could have prepared her for how much pain he was in.
Just one lonely, forgotten baby.
The mother is five months into a ten-year prison sentence - Liz doesn’t even want to know what for. There’s a better chance of locating a needle in a haystack than finding a father. And the woman’s family didn’t even come to the hospital.
Infants are brimming over with life and possibilities - and she would know, because she sees most of it. But she never saw anything from him. That should have been all the warning she needed.
Just one lonely, forgotten baby who never had a chance anyway.
“- and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
But she tried. Dear God did she try. She spent the better part of an hour in trance-like concentration, sweat sliding down her face and warning pain invading the back of her head.
In the end it didn’t even make a difference.
She hugs herself as she remembers him, lying in his incubator with only a hospital-regulation blanket.
So little. So beautiful.
So… fragile.
She despises herself for not being strong enough.
And she knows deep down in her bones - knows like she’s only known a few things in her short life - that it’s her fault Max couldn’t save him, either.
Liz isn’t sure what she did. She was so careful with him, so sure not to try anything that could hurt him.
But she did something wrong. She must have, because she refuses to believe that such an awful, heartbreaking eventuality could have come into existence on its own merits and without the help of some outside force.
Despite their fight, it’s Serena’s voice sounding in her ear, so soft and logical it’s amazing she’s not sitting on the bench beside her.
He had a mother, Liz. A mother who chose to get herself into that situation and who was taking narcotics like a replacement for prenatal vitamins. There was a physician in the prison who could have foreseen this if he’d been paying careful enough attention. There were other people -
No. No.
All of it - the miniature corpse resting in the hospital morgue; the veracity of Max’s tears - all of it is because of her.
“Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”
She ruins everything.
“No wonder he wanted the queen.”
“Tell me, how does it feel to kill your best friend?”
“LIIIIIZ!”
She hides behind her hands. Stifles sobs as ugly as the thoughts and feelings causing them.
Suddenly the tiny chapel feels more like a prison.
The stained glass depiction of the Madonna stares at her, judging and finding her wanting.
Always wanting.
She rises unsteadily to her feet, ignoring the concerned stare of the parish priest. She needs to get home before Eileen and Serena’s anxiety turns into panic. And she needs to figure out what she’s going to do about Max.
Ignoring him isn’t an option. If it was only guilt for the past fueling her thoughts, she might be able to hold out. But it’s more than that. It’s the knowledge that he’s near to her, has been breathing the same air, and is suffering just as much as she is.
Running away is probably out, too.
Because with her luck, she’d only wind up running to him.