Always With You 3:7C
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
Isabel walked over, having just gotten off the phone with her parents. “Max and Kyle are gone,” she announced.
“What?!” Valenti and Michael shouted at the same time.
“You know, of course that the University of Arizona is a large place,” Kyle said conversationally. They’d been on the road for about six hours. The last time they’d stopped for gas, they’d put the top up on the convertible.
“I guess.”
“So how are we going to find her? I mean, assuming that she’s there at all. They’re not going to just roll out the red carpet for us.”
“I know that, Kyle.”
“Ok, so how do we find her?”
“We’ll figure it out when we get there.”
“Great. Just great.” They drove in silence for another few minutes.
Suddenly Isabel was connecting with him. “Max, where are you? Where are you going?” she asked his subconscious.
Her presence was very strong, and Max almost answered aloud. If he hadn’t had other things on his mind, he might have wondered how she could have connected with him in the middle of the day. After all, her powers had been getting stronger, but this display was well beyond her usual abilities. Catching himself at the last minute, he responded, “Isabel, someone’s taken Liz.”
“Yeah, Valenti just told us. Mom said that you and Kyle left the CrashDown. Where are you going?”
“I think that they’ve taken her to Arizona, to Phoenix.”
“Ok, Max. We’ll be right behind you.”
“No, go on home. I might be wrong. In case someone calls, you guys wait at the CrashDown. Besides, we’re almost there. Whether Liz is here or not, by the time you get here, we’ll be half way home. Just get back to Roswell and wait with mom and dad.”
“Max, whoever had her tried to take Maria, too, last night.”
“What?”
“It’s true.”
“Then they did take Liz because of me.”
“Did you doubt it?”
“We need to find out what they know, and how they know it.”
“I’ll see what I can do. We found the Sword, Max. That’s how I was able to dream-walk you while you’re wide awake. It amplifies our powers. I’m going to contact Liz, and find out what I can. I’ll be back as soon as I know something.”
“Isabel,” he called out to her retreating form, “try to find out exactly where they have her.”
She nodded and disappeared out of his mind.
“Good news, Kyle,” Max said, stretching his arms feeling better than he had all day. “The cavalry’s here.”
Kyle looked into his rearview mirror. There was no one in sight. “What cavalry?”
“You’ll see.”
Normally in order to dream-walk someone, they had to be asleep, or dazed in some way. In addition, Isabel needed a photo of the person, or needed to be in the person’s immediate vicinity. The rules changed when she put on the Sword. After breaking the connection with her brother, Isabel let her powers swell inside her, and sent her mind out in search of Liz, needing only to concentrate on her face.
Soon, she was traveling at great speeds along a corridor that eventually led her into her friend’s subconscious. “Liz,” Isabel asked in shock at seeing the girl strapped to a medical gurney of some kind. “Liz, can you hear me?”
“Isabel?” Liz asked out loud, not realizing at first that the voice she was hearing was coming from inside her head. A psychiatrist or something had just left after asking her two hundred questions about where she was from and who her parents were. She’d refused to answer any of them, and they’d given her a drug of some kind. Now she was floating in a haze. The EKG machine was still running, and she turned her head to look at the lines that were blackening the otherwise white paper. “Uh oh.”
From within her mind, Isabel grabbed her subconscious self and tried to get the girl to respond to her. “Liz. Look at me. Can you tell me where you are?”
Liz looked around the sterile room with its machines and the cage placed to one side. “Hell?” she guessed, then giggled at her own joke. Realizing that it wasn’t funny, the laughter turned into tears. “I want to go home.”
Isabel shook her, “Liz, talk to me. You’re talking out loud and people can hear you. Talk only to me. Do you understand?”
Liz nodded. Responding with her mind, she said like a child needing reassurance, “Max is coming for me.”
“Yes. Yes he is,” Isabel was glad that Liz was finally responding to her. “He’ll be there soon, and we’re all going to help get you out of there. But I need you to tell me where you are.”
“I already told Max. I don’t know. No one has said anything. No one wears any ID here. There’s nothing on the walls. He’ll never find me, will he?” she started to cry again. Isabel pulled her close, and offered what comfort she could.
The door of Liz’s room flung open, and a pretty, young woman rushed in. She looked from Liz who was lying passively on the table with tears rolling across her temples to the EKG machine that was recording like crazy. “Oh my god! It’s happening again!”
“What?” asked Isabel from inside Liz’s head. Liz showed her the machine. “Oh my god, Liz! Why did you say something?”
“It didn’t matter. Max already set it off once.”
“Liz, listen to me. I’m leaving, but I won’t be far, ok? And Max is on his way. Just hold on a while longer, ok?” Liz nodded. “Ok, I need you to look at that girl. Look at her. I’m going to go visit her for a while.”
Not understanding what Isabel meant to do, Liz nonetheless obeyed. She turned her head to look at the intern that was going over the printout from the machine. “Hey!” Liz said, and startled, the other woman turned around. The second their eyes met, Liz felt Isabel’s presence leave her.
Laurie was surprised that the alien would speak to her as she’d been silent all day. “What? Did you want to speak to me?”
“Nothing,” Liz said as she closed her eyes.
Behind them, the machine was back to recording only normal patterns of brain activity.
Isabel had effortlessly made the jump from Liz’s subconscious to this girl’s. Now she would just ride along to see where she’d take her. Laurie tore off the last hour’s test results, and hurried from the room. Professor Harrison would want to see these. This time the episode or whatever it was had lasted for much longer. Stopping in the observation booth, she removed the tape from the camera that was videotaping the subject’s room. Within minutes, she was jogging down the corridor.
Without bothering to knock, she burst into the professor’s office. He turned away from the TV he’d been watching. “It happened again, Professor. Look at these results.” She laid the sheet out on his desk. From the TV, she heard a familiar voice say, ‘She just, like, attacked us in the car at Buckley Point.’ Laurie looked up at the screen to see the subject that they were currently studying in a black and white video. A girl about the same age answered, ‘I thought you went to the movies.’ The subject answered, ‘It had bad reviews.’
From Laurie’s subconscious, Isabel gasped. She remembered this conversation. She and her friends were all in Michael’s apartment the night that Topolsky returned to Roswell after having escaped the mental institution in Maryland where Agent Pierce had stashed her. She listened in horror as the rest of the scene played out, and came to understand why Liz had been taken. It didn’t have to do with Max being an alien: these people thought that Liz was an alien, too.
Laurie and Professor Harrison finished their discussion over the EKG readings, and Laurie produced the tape she’d removed from the camera in Liz’s room. “And I think we can support your telepathy theory. Look at this.” She popped out the other video and put hers into the VCR. She hit play, then rewind. After a moment of watching herself move backwards around the screen and out of the room, she hit the play button again. Liz was lying passively on her table. “It’ll be coming up in just a second. You can’t see it, but listen to the pens of the EKG machine…” They listened to the steady scratching, and they could tell when the pens began to record the elevated brain activity. For the first time in hours, Liz moved. “Isabel?” they heard her say. She looked in the direction of the camera and said, “Uh oh.” She looked around the room then said, “Hell?” in response to some question they hadn’t heard. They watched as Liz started to laugh then cry at her situation. Finally, she said, “I want to go home.” Then Laurie entered the room.
Hitting the stop button on the VCR, Laurie said, “See? It looks like she’s talking to someone. Your hypothesis that she can communicate with telepathy is right on the money.”
Professor Harrison ejected the tape from the VCR and put it into his desk with the other one. “Do you know what this means? They are coming for her, and soon. I was hoping that this would be far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to communicate across this distance, but either they are stronger than I thought, or she’s reaching out to an alien that’s nearby. I wonder if they can sense when others are in their vicinity.” He grabbed his coat. “We’ll only have a few hours until they get here. I need to make a few calls. In the meantime, get her back into her cage. We may need to relocate her quickly.”
Laurie hurried to obey. Isabel paid extra special attention to the route they took so that she could relay that information to Max.