Author: DocPaul

Email: DocPaul2002@yahoo.ca

Spoilers: None

Archive: Nope

Rating: NC-17

Disclaimers: I don't own them, but I should. I actually like them.

Summary: A take off on EoTW. FMax trying to change the world had no effect in the ultimate outcome, and at the eve of destruction, they were planning to try again, sending Liz this time. But things were taken from their hands, and Serena sends Maria to find Michael of prePilot.

Author's Note: This should have a feel of season 1, but there are some differences. Michael becomes the person with all the knowledge, and not Liz. It changes him...

*********  

It hurt.

She stood in the shadow of the tree and hurt.

He left that poor excuse of a home in an angry huff, as a man followed him screaming obscenities, jeers and hurtful things that left more scars. So many miles from home...

She waited, watching. A thin pale hand rushed over her neck as tiredness sank her body to a heap at the base of the tree. Waiting. He left. The evil bastard went out to hit a bar, to drink into oblivion, so he could come home and beat the boy, thus for a moment elevating himself above the cesspool of his life, feeling better, stronger and powerful before a cringing child.

They cry in the dark, so you can’t see their tears. They hide in the light so you can’t see their fears….love and pain become one and the same in the eyes of a wounded child.

Too tired.

The trailer was more than she expected, and somehow less at the same time. This was not a  home, it was a sentence. A prison. Going to the back room and seeing the unmade mattress that served as his bed, she lay down to sleep. Tired. Too far from home...

Roswell. It bled us. Our blood drained in the desert and seeped into the ground, staining it red.

“I can’t!”

“You must!” Serena ran around the room gathering things. Just things. It was busywork, something to occupy hands. Word had already come from the battle's edge. They broke the remaining lines. Nothing. There was no here, no now. All that remained was nothing. Serena, Max and Liz. And Maria.

And Maria thought, "I am nothing."

“There is nothing special about me, nothing I can be or do, but die.” Bitterness and bile rose in a dry laugh. See the walking dead. See the silly tricks. She died thirteen minutes and thirty-two seconds ago. Thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five...

How many seconds make up an eternity?

Serena stopped and looked at her friend. Broken. She was a shell. It took from her, and when it looked like she had nothing left to take, it took more. His blood was still on her body, staining her front, and she refused to change. It was all that was left, all she had of him, with so little left of herself.

Serena grabbed Maria’s face. No tears. She was the desert. Not even a drop of moisture was left to shed. Maria’s been crying for years, and she had nothing left to give. They took it all. Max and Liz.

“You’ve got to listen. Carefully. Soon they will try again. This time he’s sending Liz. But it won’t work. It will never work. Because they can’t change. It was over before it began.”

“I hurt.”

“I know. I know, baby. But Maria, as God is my witness, you’ve got to go. Now!”

“Why not you? You’re strong, smart...and you know...”

“Yes. But they don’t. They don’t know me. He doesn’t know me. Not yet. And there is little time. Not enough to for him to learn to trust before it’s too late.” Serena sighed. This was bad. She was still in shock, empty, and the price they were demanding of her was unimaginable.

“I can’t. To see him again...even for a moment...” Maria wrapped her arms around her middle and sank at Serena’s feet in pain. “Kill me. Make it stop.”

“Do this! Do this, and it may never begin. He may live...”

“But not with me!” Maria’s voice hollowed in pain. “Never with me.”

Serena sighed. How could she ask her to give up her lover, her husband, and all that they were? It was the bleeding wound, she knew it was, and she touched it anyway.

“Maria, you can’t miss what you'll never know. You know right now what has been, but if this works, you won't.. Your past self will never know, and there is hope in that…”

Serena held the crystal in her hand and heard them coming, talking. It was now or never. Grabbing Maria's hand she dragged her out the back door and shoved her in the car. They would follow and time was short. She glanced at  her friend's shivering body. Her only trump card, the only thing she had going for her as was Maria. And Maria's  unfaltering courage.

They looked at the Granilith, and Serena inserted the crystal, initiating the sequence.

“Maria?” The woman stood with her head bowed. Suddenly she nodded and extended her hand. Serena watched as Maria entered the Granilith and sequence began. Touching a hand to her... wishing her godspeed…

“Say it, Maria! Say it!”

Maria looked back at her and repeated the phrase as Max and Liz ran into the chamber. “There is no destiny, but that which we make.”

Max screamed, “No!” as a bright brilliant light was released in the chamber knocking Max and the others over. Maria was gone.

In the silence, Liz looked at her friend Serena in anger. “What did you do!”

Max grabbed the woman who meant so much to them, that stood with them...

“You’ve doomed us all!”

Serena looked at him, and shook his hand off in anger. “I’ve saved us. She’ll do it right this time.”

Max shook the woman in anger. “What is she doing? Tell me! What did you send her to do?”

Serena shook his hands off her, and stood on shaking feet. “She’ll do what the two of you never could do. She’ll give up her love -  my brother -  to give the world a chance of surviving.”

Max looked at his wife, at Liz and shook his head. No. Maria would not. She couldn’t. Not after all these years and everything Liz meant to her. Not even for Michael. She wasn’t that strong.

Max raised himself to his full height, and stared down the viper in his presence, another betrayer. Only Liz had remained loyal. Even Michael had questioned him at the end, and the Michael- worshippers led by his sister, Serena who was once a help, soon became an annoyance as they questioned his every command.

“I’m the King!” He gripped her hard by the arms and shook her. They were all that was left.

Serena shook off his hands. “You’re no King!” She watched in wonder as her own hand began to dissolve. She looked at Liz and Max, and she could see through them. “It’s begun!’

~~~

“Who the hell are you?”

She woke, and as sleep cleared her eyes, pain hit. He looked so beautiful. So alive. So young and angry.

Sitting up in the bed and moving her hair off her face, she couldn’t speak or even stop staring at him. It was worse than she thought it would be. The woman’s hand moved over her body and stopped at her stomach. She could still feel him inside her.

“I said, who...”

“...the hell am I? Yes, I heard you the first time. Though your bellow is as obnoxiously loud as always, it remains ever constant.” Maria stood up from his bed as he looked at her critically.

“Look, lady,” Maria’s eyebrow went up at that. “I don’t care what watering hole he found you at, or where he’s at now, but this is my room. So I suggest if you're sleeping off a drunk, go do it in Hank’s bed.”

“Thanks, but, no thanks. I wouldn’t touch that man, let alone sleep in his bed, if it was the last dying act of my body and my only chance of surviving.”

Michael sighed. Great! Fucking great! Kicking his door, he turned and looked at the woman again. She was young, too young for Hank. And she was beautiful, if you liked that poured-in tight leather, too short skirt, sexy skank look. He frowned. Hating his teenage hormones.

“I came for you, Michael.”

What? Michael actually backed up. “Who are you?”

“I’m Maria DeLuca.” She left off the Guerin at the end. It didn’t matter. After ten years of marriage they had still argued over the subject of whether she should take his last name or hyphenate it. Her throat closed. Actually, they weren’t. There was no more arguing. There was nothing. Nothing.

His eyes narrowed and his posture defensive. “No you’re not! I know that crazy, ditzy Maria girl. She’s not you.”

“She will be.”

“What? Did she fall into 'Skanks Anonymous'? I don’t remember her once wearing so much leather.”

“Skanks?” She actually laughed at that. Like he was going to be anything but a walking advertisement for massive cow death. “Don’t make me get tough with you, Spaceboy. I know what the smell of leather does to you.”

He swore, and moved the jacket in his hand more in front of his body. It was just raging hormones colliding with the sight of her,  a scantily clad woman in his bed. That was all. He had that dream every night, just before the sex kitten turned into an FBI agent and blew his brains away. A fuck for the road. Alien groupie.

Maria sighed. This was wrong. She didn’t have time.

“I need your help.”

“No.”

~~~

Following him down a road as he walked away, she cursed. Yeah, this was working great.

“Would you just listen?” He just kept on walking, ignoring her.

“I said...”

“I heard you!” Running his hand over his face, he stopped and faced her. “I don’t believe this. You’re an escaped mental patient. And this has nothing to do with me.”

He turned away, and she grabbed his arm, her breast heaving in anger. Of all their long-ago circle, he was the worst. The most defensive. She had to come to him.

“You’re an alien.” She ignored his startled look. He was so young and so guarded, but not guarded or old enough to stop his reaction. “If you don’t help me, listen to me, or even entertain the notion that I’m who I say I am, and not some lunatic on a hallucinatory binge, in about twenty-four hours your world is going to change. Your deep, dark, alien secret will be exposed, and nothing...nothing will ever be the same again.”

It was her voice. The firmness. The unshakeable honesty ringing in the rich tones...and the alien thing. Michael’s eyes narrowed. Still...

He walked off again. “You like pistachio ice cream...”

Michael stopped, and then shrugged. Lots of people do. He kept walking.

"What incensed him the most was the blatant jokes of the ones who pass it all off as a jest, pretending to understand everything and in reality not knowing their own minds."

He stopped.

“James Joyce, Ulysses. Page 655. You read it. You read it a lot. It’s your favorite book, and you keep a dog-eared copy under your mattress, and you stole it from a foster home you once were in for six days. You couldn’t even read then, but the book...owning it...holding it...made you feel better. Later, years later, you read it and understood it more, usually after Hank beat you.”

Michael rushed her, grabbed her close and got in her face. “You know nothing! Nothing about me!”

Maria pushed him off her. “I know everything.” He started walking again. “I know you like early morning the best because it feels clean, fresh and new. You lose yourself in your own thoughts, and you’re afraid of touching and being touched, because you can’t miss something you never knew. You envy your best friends, Max and Isabel Evans, but hate them at the same time. Isabel is your favorite because she's snarky and biting and hates everyone, so you don’t feel so bad about not liking people, because she hates them more. Max is too perfect, the great moralizer, and most of the time you just feel that you’re wrong. They make you feel wrong. But you would die for them.”

His eyes darkened as he shoved shaking hands in his pockets. “I don’t know what you’re damage is, or who you think you are, but I don’t know you.”

“I know. But you will. Or you did. I’m Maria DeLuca. I’m from the future coming back in time in a device created by your people. To stop a wrong. A rip in the balance.” He remained stonefaced. “I can prove it.”

He paused, and then moved off the road to a strand of trees. “Then prove it.”

Maria pulled a piece of metal from her pocket and tossed it to him.

“Crush it.”

Michael did, and suddenly it went back to it original form. “What the fuck?”

“You got it from a man named Hal, a year from now. He saved you, saved all of you when the crash originally happened, and you owed him your very existence.”

“You know things?” Michael moved closer to her, not believing, but needing to know. She held those answers he searched for, and even if it was a lie, it was more than he had. She did look like Maria DeLuca, but not quite the same. Maria was cute with the promise of beauty when her body finally caught up to her mouth. The same eyes and that mouth, but she looked older, and as incredibly beautiful as he suspected she'd be. But that beauty was marred by the look in her eyes. There was nothing there. Not even a spark of life. Only death.

“Yes. I know so much. About you, about Isabel and Max. I know the lies you’re told, the betrayal you’ll face, and even the joys. I know...everything.”

“And you want me to do...what?”

Maria sat down on the ground, kneeling on her knees and sitting back on her hunches. “I want you to keep Max out of the Crashdown tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.”

“He’ll drag you there so he can watch Liz Parker.” Michael just snorted. She sure called that one right. Skinny, too serious, Plain Jane Liz Parker. He just didn’t get it. She had nothing going on.

“Why? Does Liz finally notice he’s alive or something?”

“Worse. She dies.” Maria plucked the grass next to her.

“Dies?” Michael frowned and his concentration became sharper, more suspicious.

“An incident. She gets shot, and Max heals her. In front of witnesses, a café full of witnesses and alien freaks, and you’re exposed.”

Michael swore. That had to be a lie.

“That’s a lie! Maxwell wouldn’t do that! He’s...we've had a pact since childhood. It’s just the three of us. No one else. We’re all any of us have. He wouldn’t put me and Isabel in danger for a nothing of a girl who doesn’t even know his name, or that he’s alive.”

“She knows him after he heals her. They...” Maria stopped. She couldn’t say anymore. “It just starts everything. It exposes you to your worst nightmare.”

He stared off into the distance. Roswell. Fucking Roswell. Fucking planet Earth.

“So if Max doesn’t save Liz, then she’s going to...”

“Die.” Maria looked away.

He stood up and paced, rubbing his hands through his hair and making it stand up even more.

“This is a lie! You’re lying!”

“I’m not!”

“Maria DeLuca, that crazy yakking chick is Liz Parker’s best friend. She’d never, never let her friend die.” Michael moved away from her. “I don’t know who you are, or what you want, but I know nothing. You’ve got the wrong man.”

“You’re not a man! You’re a boy! A poorly washed, bad tempered, nasty and mean alien boy with bad hair! And if you walk away...if you leave without helping...this timeline will continue and everything will remain the same.”

“Why me! Why not your past self? Why should I trust a word you say?”

“Because I’m your wife.” Maria said. Fuck the 'no two identical masses occupying the same space at the same time or they wink into non-existence' stuff. She couldn't understand that science crap, and Michael was even worse at it.

~~~

Michael shut his bedroom door and listened carefully. Hank was home, sleeping off a drunk. She was on his bed again, sitting there with her hands in between her knees pressing them tightly.

“Wife? That’s insane. I’d never...”

“Mate with a human? Let anyone in close enough to marry them?” Maria's bitter laugh was tinged in regret. “Well, rest assured, it wasn’t easy. Many times you pushed me away, almost left me forever, and yet we stuck. I dumped you a few times myself like a bad habit, but like all bad habits, we kept finding each other again. It took us years of growing and raging to come to understand that we never really could leave each other, that we took each other with us wherever we went.”

Michael sat down beside her. No way.

“It wasn’t easy. It never was with us. We loved each other the best when we were apart. Too close, and it was harder. We kept losing ourselves in each other, and there were things we both needed to do. It took us a lot of time and pain to learn that we could do them together. That the weakness and vulnerability we cause in each other was actually our strength.”

“When did we finally stop breaking up?” he asked quietly, still not believing.

“The day I realized I was pregnant.” She laughed sadly at the memory. “I tossed a pot of hot food at you for knocking me up.”

Michael looked at her in shock.

She laughed. “Time doesn’t change that expression! Yeah, that’s the one. Your shocked, 'roll me and fuck me' look. Love it. Love you.”

“Maria.” He stopped. “Do I call you Maria?”

“Yeah. That took some time too. You’ve been even known to call me ‘honey’.”

He made a face at that.

She laughed again. “Yeah. It usually meant you wanted something. Usually sex.” Her eyes noted the increasing blush of his skin. God, he was so young.

“Sooo, how long?” He cleared his throat uncertain what he was asking. How long were they married? Or how long did they deny being together? Or how long did she plan to stay here convincing him that she wasn't a loon? “How long until we married?”

“Four years of frickin’ hell trying to learn to like being together, but once we did, we had ten years of pure fire and passion. I screamed, you shut down. I’d get angry, you’d get angry, and that usually led to rolling around on the floor and three children.”

“We’ve got children?” He’d never...or so he thought.

“We did.” She said silently.

“Did?” He was shocked at the glittery shine to her eyes, the suppressed tears.

“It doesn’t matter. None of this does. If we restore the balance, none of that will ever happen.”

Michael grabbed her hard. “What happened to our children?”

“Michael...”

“Just tell me! What happened?”

Maria shrugged off his hand. “They died in a house bombing along with Isabel’s two children and my mother. They took them from us, and we stood outside watching the flames with the heat too hot for us to enter and save them. Even your powers combined with Isabel’s couldn’t douse the flames. We listened to their screams...”

Her voice broke and he watched her hands shake. The feeling of loss and moisture was behind his eyes. He could feel her pain and it felt alive. It felt like part of him as well.

“Was...was I a good father?” He never thought to be, or even hoped. It wasn’t just the alien thing. It was Hank. Would he be like Hank?

“The best.” He just sat back in silence, not even sure if he was relieved.

She wasn’t finished. “We always knew there had to be something better than Roswell. It took us some time to realize that it was each other, and that the something better was them, our children.” Her voice was quiet and soft.

Rubbing a tear off her cheek, she stood up and looked at him.

“You’ve got to help me! I can’t live through it again. My younger self. It destroyed my spirit. It hardened you. All you lived for was revenge and hate after that. I couldn’t touch you. It was like even a simple touch was too painful.” Maria wiped her face. “I love Liz Parker. She’s my best friend, a sister, and this is killing me. But none of you can bring someone back from the dead. It’s forbidden. It puts the natural balance of things out of sync.”

“All this because Liz Parker lived?”

“Yes. She interacted in events that she wouldn’t have been around for, if she had died at sixteen the way she was supposed to. When Max’s future wife appeared, he ignored her because he was in love with Liz. This woman, she was kept on the outside and she could never break in. It hardened her against you. And all of you were exposed. Too young. Your powers were on the verge of an awakening. Before that, they were volatile and almost uncontrollable. Your people didn’t account for puberty. All those conflicting emotions and hormones ran crazy and none of you were prepared for the responsibilities. None of us were. We made promises and commitments too young, before we’d even grown into our bodies.”

“If Liz died, how long would we have had?”

“I don’t know. It could be years, or even days. The balance was wrecked, but you have to understand, all I know is this timeline and what happened in it. It’s this timeline that has to end.” Maria looked at him, and her face was shuttered and cold as she tried to keep everything inside. “If we succeed, the course of your life - of all of our lives - will go on the way it should have originally. That's something I can’t tell you about because even I don’t know.”

Michael looked down at his hands. If what she was saying was correct or even partially true, his friend Maxwell was going to destroy them all. It would break Max’s heart, but it was that or the end of everything.

“Okay. What do I got to do?”

“Keep Max away, so he can’t save her.” Maria sighed. Liz. Liz would be gone.

He looked at her sharply, frowning at her monotone response. “I can’t believe you’re so cold about this, that this means nothing to you! I thought she was your friend.”

Maria looked at him with tears in her eyes, but she quickly wiped them away. “She was and always has been my best friend, or at least she was until you. You can’t know what this will cost me...the price. I lose her, I  destroy my younger self who has abandonment issues, and I lose all hope of ever knowing you or getting close to you. It’ll cost me everything, and I see no chance of my younger self surviving uninjured.”

“Then why?”

She laid down on his bed and covered her eyes with her arm letting herself rest.

“Because it was wrong. Max came back and he tried to change things, tried to get Liz to help him, but it didn’t work. They couldn’t stay apart, not even for the world. We paid a huge price. We lost Alex at eighteen, and so much more along the way. Max and Liz can’t deny themselves, so the rest of us will have to be strong and do it for them.”

He watched her as she seemed to be drifting off to sleep. She really was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Not really all that skanky actually, but more like incredibly sexy.

“There is no destiny, except that which we make,” she whispered as she fell asleep.

He sat on the floor beside the bed and watched her sleep. For the first time in his life, he watched someone else whose sleep was more upset and troubled than his own.

~~~

“Maxwell.”

“Michael, didn’t expect you to show at school today. That makes twice this week. A new record?”

“I was trying to hide from the truancy officers, figured here was the best place. I can sleep just as easy in class as out of it.”

Max smiled slightly, but he was suddenly distracted by the movement of Liz Parker down the hall with her best friend, Maria DeLuca. Suddenly there was a tall thin man tossing himself around the back of Maria hugging her tight and talking to Liz excitedly. Liz Parker made a funny face and reached over Maria to pinch Alex’s cheeks talking in a funny voice, making Maria laugh. Alex rushed the girls and the three of them ended up in a mass of arms and legs laughing and hugging.

Michael watched the interaction with interest. Alex Whitman. He died. She said that he died at eighteen, in just two short years. How? She didn’t say, but it was a direct result of Max’s saving Liz Parker and them not being able to change the timeline on their first attempt. Or changing it, but not enough to save the world, or any of them ultimately. Maria said that they couldn’t change. Max and Liz couldn’t give up their great love, and no matter how they tried, or how much they knew of the consequences, they made excuses to be together. Actual events changed...but the end results remained the same.

Her smile. It started inside her and then just shone out, all brilliant.  Those eyes, their smile was even more dazzling than her mouth, but it was those lips that attracted him first. They were all shiny with her lip gloss, and whenever he passed her in the hall, she smelt so incredible. Her laugh was all light and tingly moving along his spine...She was everything he was not. Alive.