Always With You 3:5D
Always With You Part Three by Watcher Tara
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Disclaimer: I do not own any part of Roswell.
Summary: Max and Kyle have to team up to save Liz from an unexpected threat. Meanwhile, the rest of the gang returns to Marathon, Texas looking for answers and finds more than they anticipated.
Category: Max/Liz
Rating: PG
Liz was strapped hand and foot to the gurney. The past hour was like a nightmare. They’d taken blood, hair and skin samples from her. She was finally allowed to go to the bathroom when they’d wanted a urine sample. Her entire midsection hurt from having to hold it for so that she worried that she’d gotten a bladder infection. They’d just finished taking x-rays of her entire body. Now, they were adhering electrode things to her forehead and neck, in preparation to doing more tests.
None of the technicians who came and went out of the room spoke to her, and she’d given up trying to get them to answer her. The few times she’d been left alone, she’d tried to free herself, but couldn’t do anything with her metal restraints. She couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t either come undone, or allow her to change their molecular structure into something more flimsy, like cotton candy.
She thought about the tests that they had done on her. There was no denying what was happening. For some reason somebody here thought that she was one of the aliens. She knew that her problems were just beginning. There were only two possible scenarios of what could happen next: Number one, they could soon see their mistake and realize that she was human. The problem with that was she couldn’t see them coming to her, admitting their error and just letting her go. Whoever had kidnapped her had taken a terrible chance, and was not going to simply free her so that she could go to the authorities and have them all arrested.
One the other hand, things could go from bad to worse if anything in the test that they were about to do revealed the powers that she had developed from Max healing her last year. As they begun to monitor her brain output, or whatever the lines that the machine was drawing on the piece of long white paper were supposed to represent, she made sure that the energy that powered her abilities was dormant. She lay on the gurney as passively as possible and focused on nothing, hoping that this test would be normal, too.
That is, until she felt Max’s presence trying to get into her subconscious. The previous times that he had dream-walked her there had been so many things going on that she had not noticed that she could feel him trying to make contact with her. Now that her mind was completely cleared, she could sense him easily. One of the pens on the paper jumped. ‘Not now, Max,’ she thought. This was the worse time for him to try this. The machine jumped again as she felt Max calling out to her.
Isabel had said that a person could fight her dream-walking, but she hadn’t said how. Without using her own powers, she tried to block Max, but it was no use. There wasn’t any way to keep him out.
Max was determined to make the connection. Liz saw the pen jump across the paper, making sweeping arcs. “Max,” she whispered. Then it was too late. She watched the pens all go crazy, recording Max’s energy supplementing her own as he completed the connection between their subconsciouses.
He ran over to her and looked down at her on the table. “Liz. Oh my god! What are they doing to you?”
“Max, you have to go. Right now. They’re monitoring this.”
“How.” She nodded toward the machine so that he could see it.
“Tell me where you are. Who’s doing this?”
“I don’t know. Someone who thinks that I’m like you. I don’t know where I am. They’ve done all sorts of tests, Max.”
“Didn’t you see anything when they brought you here.”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe.”
“What did you see?”
From within her mind, she showed him the wall that she’d seen with the ‘Go, Wildcats!’ painting on it. “I don’t know if it means anything.”
Max had to believe that it was a clue. He agreed that it looked like some kind of sports mascot. “I’m coming for you Liz. Right now. Hold on until I get there, ok? I won’t let anything happen to you. Do you believe me?”
She nodded. “With all of my heart.”
“I love you.” He bent and kissed her softly. “Hold onto that.”
“I will,” she whispered, and then he was gone.
The door to the observation room slammed opened and someone said, “What the hell was that?!”
Liz fearfully looked over at the machine. The paper, which should have four sedate lines squiggling along it, was practically covered in black ink as the lines had zigzagged so rapidly that they filled up the page. The pens were just now settling back down into normal patterns. Groaning, she dropped her head back onto the table and stared fixedly ahead at the ceiling.
Max and Kyle were sitting at the intersection of 285 and 380, the two highways that crossed in Roswell. Max opened his eyes, and blinked against the hot sun that was now overhead.
“Well, Evans, which way?”
“Do you know what school the Wildcats play for?” Max asked in return.
“The Wildcats? Yeah, they’re the University of Arizona’s football team.”
“You’re sure?”
“Of course,” said Kyle, who watched all college sports.
“Then, that’s where we’re going.”
“That is in Arizona, you know. Phoenix if I’m not mistaken. It’s like a ten-hour drive from here. If you’re wrong, Evans, so help me…”
“Then we’d best be going. Do you have a map?”
Kyle pulled his car out onto 380 West while reaching behind Max’s chair. He dropped a road atlas in Max’s lap.
Kyle drove as Max navigated, and the two boys flew down the highway in the red convertible at speeds that would have made his father cringe. Kyle figured ‘what was the point of having a Mustang if you didn’t flex a little muscle once in a while?’ Besides, they were on a mission. He turned the volume up on the radio and settled into his seat.
Back at the CrashDown, Diane Evans righted the overturned table and chair. Picking up the scattered items, she replaced them on the tabletop, all the while looking curiously out the door. She wondered where Max and the sheriff’s son had gone in such a hurry.
Hastening back into the kitchen, she found a pitcher of cold tea, and four glasses. She quickly finished preparing some drinks and carried them on a tray back upstairs. Nancy was showing her some of their old photos. Diane wasn’t surprised at how much they had in common; after all, they were both mothers with teenage daughters. They had been sharing stories back and forth like old friends for the last hour. It seemed to help keep Nancy’s mind of the immediate crisis, which was the point.
“What was that noise?” Jeff asked, taking the tray from her as she entered the living room.
“I’m not sure, but the boys are gone.”
“You know, it’s funny to see the two of them together,” Phillip said.
“Why?” asked Nancy.
“Well, it was just,” he turned to Jeff. “You remember at the Father campout: I don’t remember them saying two words to each other, even though our sites were all right together like that. In fact, I got the feeling that they disliked one another.”
Jeff nodded, agreeing that he’d noticed the same thing. Nancy said, “Well, you know that Liz dated Kyle for a while last year?”
“Really?” Diane asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well that explains the tension. I take it that she broke it off with him?” Phillip asked.
“You know, I’m not sure. I mean it was strange the way they broke up. One day the were dating, the next, they weren’t.”
“Sounds pretty normal for a teenager, if you ask me,” Phillip said.
“Yeah,” Jeff agreed. “It sure happened to me a couple of times.”
Phillip toasted him with his glass of ice tea, and said, “You’re not the only one.” The two men fell into memories of their teenaged years.
“Max and Liz seem pretty serious, though,” Diane said.
“Yeah. You know, the night we met him I noticed then how intensely they looked at each other. You remember, don’t you, Jeff?”
“As if I could forget,” he answered. “My mom had had a stroke, and we were all at the hospital,” he explained to the Evans’.
“It was you, me, Liz and Kyle.”
“Right. And right after the doctor came out and told us that mom was getting better, Max walked into the waiting room.”
“I don’t even know how he found out that we were there,” Nancy said. “He looked at Liz in such a way. I could tell right then that he cared a great deal about her.”
“Yeah. We all could. Which is probably why Kyle jumped all over him. Asking him why he was at the hospital and all.” Jeff shook his head. “He’d said that a cousin had been in a car accident. It still didn’t explain how he knew we were there and how to find us.”
“What?” Diane asked. “None of the rest of our family lives here. He wouldn’t have gone to Roswell’s hospital because of a cousin.”
Jeff shrugged, “Well that’s what he’d said at the time. I remember it because his face had looked like he was the one who’d been in a car accident. His cheeks were scraped up, and he had a split lip. He was quite a sight.” He shook his head at the memory.
“That was near the end of last year, wasn’t it?” Phillip asked, remembering when Max had come home one night all beat up. He’d scared his mother half to death.
“The third week of October.” The date was burned into Jeff’s memory, as his mother hadn’t recovered after all. She’d had another massive stroke a couple of days later and passed away. It was a time he’d never forget.
“He and his friend Michael had been playing basketball, and he’d gotten creamed on the cement.”
“It must have been some game,” Jeff said.
“Yeah.” That led into a discussion of sports that kept the men occupied for a while. Nancy and Diane returned to the photo albums. It was some time later that Diane looked at her watched and for the first time noticed the hour. She wondered where Isabel was. Her daughter had spent the night at a friend’s house last night, and hadn’t checked in with them yet. On any other day, Diane wouldn’t have worried, but with everything that was going on, her mothering instincts were in overdrive and she needed to know that her daughter was safe.