AUTHOR: Aurora
RATING: PG-13
PAIRING: Kyle; mentions of K/L and M/L
IMPROV#8: lilac -- amuse -- savor -- sky
DISCLAIMER: Jason Katims et al, own and misuse them.
SUMMARY: “Every day he looks up, waiting for the day that he won’t have to
search the sky for answers any longer.”
SPOILERS: None really, references to ‘EOTW’
DISTRIBUTION: Improv, lists, r:albs, anyone else just ask!
FEEDBACK: would be appreciated, since I’m not used to wandering around
inside the mind of Kyle; girl292@hotmail.com
AUTHOR’S NOTES: This idea hit me over the head the other night, and wouldn’t
let me write anything else until it was done.  Here’s what you need to know:
takes place about 3 years from the current timeline and everything up
through ‘Samuel Rising’ has happened.
DEDICATION: This was written as a Thank You Present for my darling fellow
fanfic addict, Elise, who went way above and beyond the call of duty in
remedying the ‘Buffy Musical VCR Disaster of 2001’ and was nice enough to
throw in my very own copy of ‘IWRY’ to cry over.  I appreciate her babbles,
her advice and ever-ready beta help more than she knows!  So, Elise, this
angst’s just for you!! *smooches*
**

**
Swear by the Sky
by Aurora
**

The sky is all wrong.

It was the first thing he thought as he watched her disappear like the
scattering of fallen leaves before a storm.  Standing there, crushed beneath
the weight of the stark reality that clouded his brain as her words echoed
in his ears, all sweetness and warm breath masking the fear that simmered
close to the surface, too close, stunned at the real terror that threatened
to spill from her lips, heavy as the tears that clung to her dark eyelashes
as she said goodbye.

He often wonders about that.  Why the sky was the first thing that
registered in his mind even as the rest of him was frantically memorizing
every detail of her as she slid into the idling car next to Max Evans: long
dark hair swinging loose across her graceful shoulders, simple lilac
t-shirt, old blue jeans, and the sneakers she wore that summer they spent
every day at the lake.

He likes to think that her choice in clothes was motivated more out of
sentiment than the imperative to leave and leave now, but he knows better.

She left and he just stood there in the doorway and watched without
faltering, wanting the image of her forever seared into his memory as she
disappeared down the quiet early morning street, lost amongst the rows of
smug suburban houses in the next instant.

He finds it amusing that he was so concerned about the sky then, and not
something more suited to the situation that was about to explode all around
them.

But he wasn’t.

Instead of dwelling on the slow ache that was forming in his chest, he
forced himself to look away from the now empty street and found that the
deep blue self-assuredness of the sky and the puffy, white, cheerfulness of
the clouds was too much to bear.

It was all wrong.  It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

It shouldn’t be warm and sunny and bright.  The sky should be filled with
night as thick as the pain that filled his lungs making it hard to breathe. 
The darkness should split at the seams and empty its weight down on them
all, erasing the very real nightmare he’d wandered into when he left his
bowl of cereal on the table to find a visibly shaken Liz on his doorstep. 
The world should have been shuddering under the heavy sadness that tugged at
his heart instead of going merrily about its business, indifferent to the
way it felt like a thousand shards of glass had been shoved in between each
of his ribs causing even the simple act of taking a single breath to feel
like he was being ground into tiny bits of sour regret.

Sometimes he likes to think that she would have come to him for help like
she did once before, even though his rational mind knows better.  Knows that
she didn’t involve him on purpose, hoping to spare him the same terror and
broken existence which hovered just on the horizon for her.  He knows that
it’s part of what saved him, that he didn’t know the details, that she only
said goodbye and nothing more.

Nothing more.

Liz Parker saved his life, but nothing could have saved his father.  He’d
been seen with the ‘other worlders’ too many times and under suspicious
circumstances.  Hell, he’d been removed from his position because of it and
everyone knew it.  No one stood up for his father.  No one protested when
Kyle opened the door to find two plain looking guys in dark, pressed suits
asking to speak with James Valenti.  No one seemed to notice when two days
went by and his father still hadn’t returned home.

He doesn’t really remember much of the details of what happened next.  It’s
all just blurry outlines and the remnants of anxiety and fear, hazy dreams
filled with interrogations and the constant threat of being hauled in for
‘special questioning’.  He refuses to think about what they did to his
father.  Refuses to be pulled back down into the rage and the hate that
courses through his blood at the memories, so he blocks it out.

Just like he blocks out what they did to him.  But he survived.  He was
judged to be ‘clean’ and ‘uncontaminated’ by the ‘others’.  He can’t help
but smirk at the cruel irony of that fact.  If they only knew just how
contaminated he really was.  He doesn’t worry about the truth coming out
anymore.  It’s been too long; besides, they wouldn’t believe it now anyway. 
Not with the show he put on to save himself.

Once he started telling lies to survive, living one became easy.

It’s been a long time.  Three years that seem more like an eternity when he
lets himself dwell on it, so he doesn’t.  Instead he just goes about his
life, finding comfort in the simple routine, ignoring that nagging small
voice in his heart that still remembers the truth.

Sometimes he thinks that he knows too much about the consequences of telling
the truth.  No, the truth wouldn’t serve him now any better than it helped
them then.  When the careful illusion of normalcy that Max, Michael and
Isabel had surrounded themselves with cracked and fell around them all in
jagged pieces heavy with deceit, mindless of who else was damaged in their
wake.

Even after all this time, he still isn’t sure how it all came out.  He knows
that Phillip Evans had a lot to do with it but he was never told the rest. 
It was too dangerous for him to know then.  And now -- now, he wishes that
he didn’t know what happened after.

Isabel was the first one they took.  She wouldn’t leave.  She didn’t run
like the others when his father got wind that their secret was out and
warned them.  Michael and Maria slipped off the night before, then Max and
Liz left town that next morning.  They split up, hoping to avoid being
followed.  He knows what it cost them to stop at his house before they left
for good.  He could see it in the way that Max’s knuckles went white
gripping the steering wheel, watching as Liz wrapped her arms around him in
his doorway and pressed in close to whisper goodbye.

They all ran, hoping to escape it, but not Isabel.   She refused to leave
Jesse.  She tried to tell him the truth, believed that he loved her enough
to trust her, to help her, but he didn’t.  Kyle remembers the anxiety in her
tone when she confided in him about her plans to tell Jesse everything. 
He’d wanted to be supportive, but even he could see that it was bound to go
badly.  But ever-stubborn as she was, Isabel wouldn’t listen to him,
wouldn’t listen to any of them.  So she did it.  She told her husband of six
months the truth and he turned on her even as he turned her over to her
father and, eventually the FBI.

Kyle tries to forget that it wasn’t too terribly long ago that he would have
done the same thing to Max Evans without blinking an eye.  It doesn’t matter
now, he tells himself daily, it’s too late for that.

Sure he once hated Max Evans, and the rest of the world still thinks that he
does, but now -- now he hates himself even more.

Because he’s the only one left.

He’s all alone in the house.  The same house he’s spent his entire life in,
except, now it seems different.  Now, there are rooms that he doesn’t go
into, doors that remain closed and locked tight against the past that’s
stacked in neat rows of unlabelled cardboard boxes just behind them. 
Sometimes he can’t even stand to be in his own room, despite the fresh coat
of paint and new furniture.  Most nights he just spends on the couch,
staring listlessly at the ceiling with infomercials droning on endlessly in
the background, forgetting to sleep.

He thinks about moving then, in the long hours of the nights that stretch
on, when the slightest noise makes him jump, when the memories assault him
each time he closes his eyes.  Seriously considers throwing a few things in
his old gym bag and just getting behind the wheel of his truck and never
looking back.  It’s worse on the days that he stumbles across some reminder
of his father that he forgot to box up, when he forgets to breathe as the
memories are suddenly dredged up, soaked in pain and lingering fear.

He wants to run, but he can’t.

Kyle won’t leave Roswell, even though the list of reasons he should go is
long enough to fill a phone book, there’s one reason he should stay.

Liz.

Every time he thinks that he’s had enough, that it would be so easy to just
leave, Liz is what stops him.  He can’t bear the thought that when the day
he’s longing for arrives, the day that Liz needs him, he won’t be there. 
He’ll have gone and ended up somewhere she can’t reach him if she needs help
and the thought of letting her down after all this time is too much to take.
  So he stays.

He stays and he tries to quiet that voice in the back of his mind that’s
forever reminding him that it’s been three years without a single word from
Liz.  Thirty-six months and no idea if she’s okay.  He tries to tell himself
that it’s a good thing that there’s been no word, that it means they haven’t
been caught.  Tries to reassure himself that the local gossip hounds would
know immediately if the remaining two of the infamous “Roswell Five” had
been captured.  Three years and no one has mentioned Max Evans and Liz
Parker for at least a year and a half, since the time that the whispers ran
rampant around town about what happened to Michael and Maria.  But he
refuses to let himself go there. No, it’s better this way.

No news is good news.  No news is good news.

He repeats it to himself constantly, unconsciously, like the remnants of a
prayer long since devoid of any hope, but whispered out of habit, out of
need, just the same.

It doesn’t help.

Nothing helps.  Instead, he focuses his energy on maintaining his carefully
controlled, ‘normal’ existence.  Spends his days working along side the very
same people who were happy to turn him into the Special Unit before he was
deemed ‘clean’, the same people who now just smile their plastic smiles and
wave as he passes them on the street.  It takes a lot of effort on Kyle’s
part to maintain the illusion of calm, pretending to fit in, sticking to his
daily routine, smiling back without cracking under the weight of regret that
claws at his throat every single time.

Most days, he hates leaving the house, but he knows that he can’t afford to
act different, can’t risk throwing suspicion on himself again.  So every
Monday through Friday, without fail, he’s out joining the working world,
mingling and talking, and never quite noticing the faces of the people he
would condemn to death in an instant if it meant that he could bring his
father back.  He doesn’t stop to wonder if it’s a fair trade, a town full of
cowards for the lives of his father and friends.  He figures that the scales
of justice don’t measure just the weight of bodies, that they have to look
much deeper, that they can judge the weight of intent and therefore should
be able to discern quite easily that the sheer magnitude of the town’s
combined lies is enough to reveal the innocence of a few.  His few.  His
family, now gone.

He stays home on the weekends, doing nothing, trying not to dwell on one
thought for too long.  Usually Casey Daniels, the big middle line backer
from varsity football their senior year, comes over with a cooler of beer
and they watch the game.  Kyle doesn’t mind it so much, it helps him
maintain that sought after semblance of normality: two buddies, sitting
around, drinking beer and bitching at the blindness of the refs.

When Casey first started showing up, Kyle used to be relieved, used to cling
to the distraction provided by the noise of the game and the hum of cheap
beer in his system.  But the respite didn’t last long.

It never does.

Casey still comes, and they still bullshit about girls and try and predict
the outcome of the game but Kyle can’t tune it all out anymore.  Can no
longer find the same temporary escape as he did once before.  The hurt is
still there in his gut and his chest, the fear, the worry and the
uncertainty burning him with each breath, clawing at the edges of his eyes
in the hot tears he refuses to let surface in Casey’s presence.  He tries to
numb it with cheap alcohol but all it does is open up the floodgates to the
memories.  Sometimes they’re of his dad, sometimes of his interrogations,
but most of the time it’s neither.  Most of the time when he downs his sixth
beer in under an hour and leans back against the couch to stare vacantly at
the blurry colors of the TV screen, it’s reminders of *her* that surface in
the haze of his mind.

Liz Parker.

The girl that he’d loved as long as he could remember.  His first kiss
(though no one, not even she, knew that).  The girl that he lost to Max
Evans.

He’s not bitter about it anymore.  He’s long since come to terms with the
fact that he will love Liz Parker until the day that he dies and she will
never return it with more than the love of a friend.  He’s okay with it now
because loving her is enough.  Remembering her happy, even if it was Max’s
arms and mouth and lips that made her so, is enough.

So when he starts to feel the effects of the alcohol, when he swears he can
catch the warm lilt of her laughter echoing from another room, can see the
flash of her hair out of the corner of his eye, he lays his head back,
closes his eyes and allows himself to remember.

If he holds really still, he can feel the whisper soft brush of her skin
against his own as she got into bed beside him that night she came to him
for help and he was more than willing to oblige.  He remembers the small
talk to keep his nervousness at bay and the warm way her laughter washed
over him as they lay there in her bed just talking.  It had been so long
since he’d seen her truly smile at him.  Too long since he’d heard her
laugh, since before Max Evans came crashing down into their lives.

He hates the way that moment was stolen from him when Max showed up and
found them.  Hates the way that Liz’s face crumpled with tears she wouldn’t
let fall in his presence as she scampered out of bed and into the bathroom
without a word.  God, how he wanted to go to her and hold her and tell her
that whatever it was, it would be alright, he would make it alright.  But he
didn’t, and she wouldn’t come out of the bathroom, just thanked him through
the closed door, her voice muffled but he could hear the agony inherent in
the shaky tone of her voice just the same.  It sliced through him with a
pain so raw, so real, he choked on his own tears as he hurriedly dressed and
left her there, huddled in anguish in her bathroom.

He thought that the pain of seeing Liz like that was the worst thing he’d
ever had to go through, until the next day, when she pulled him into the
eraser room and wouldn’t meet his eyes as she asked him to tell the entire
football team about them.  It took him a second to make sense of her
request, and when he did, he opened his mouth to ask her why but found that
no words would come, found that his voice was caught in his throat and his
lungs were tight with pain, as he realized that she was just using him to
hurt Max.  He closed his mouth and hardened his eyes for fear of what she
might glimpse within them if she ever pulled her attention from her
contemplation of her shoes.

When he didn’t answer her right away, she begged.  She pinned him to the
spot with the desperation in her voice and he caved.  He promised to tell
the entire world that they’d slept together, even though he could barely get
the words out, and he watched as her demeanor sagged, deflated as if all
will to move beyond this moment just vanished.  His fingers itched to reach
out and draw her into him, to be reassuring and tell her that it would be
alright, but he wasn’t sure she’d let him.  The distance between them was so
much more vast than the six inches of concrete under their feet, and before
he could act, before he could overcome the fear of rejection and reach out
for her, she turned and left.  Left him standing there with his heart in his
throat and his hands clenched into fists and her perfume drowning him in
sorrow and memories.  He knew right then that that night, that carefully
orchestrated lie, was the closest he would ever get to her in that way.

He doesn’t ever let himself dwell past that point, because that would bring
up memories of Tess, and that’s treading too close to the beginning of the
end of his former life.  He just pushes aside the remnants of the pain of
that day and tries to focus on Liz’s smile, savoring the warmth of the
image, before he opens his eyes to face the cruel reality of an existence
without her in it.

An existence filled with the normal, mindless preoccupations of everyday
living, of everyone’s expectations and the numbing escape of routine. 
Routine is all he has left to keep himself from going crazy.  Running mental
checklists, timetables and habitual idiosyncrasies; these are the fabric of
his existence now.  Not silky, long, dark hair and wide chocolate eyes that
could always see right through him.  Could pierce through all the swagger
and bravado and see down into the heart that wanted nothing more than to
make her smile again.

No, he clings to his routines and finds a strange comfort in their
consistency.

Like every morning, he walks down the slope of the driveway to get the paper
with his coffee and tries not to look up.  Tries not to note the mood of the
sky.  Tries to ignore it, tries not to search for some meaning behind the
weather.  Tries, and fails, every single morning like clockwork.

He would never admit it to anyone, even if there was someone for him to
admit it to, but he can recall, with shocking clarity, each and every detail
of what the sky looked like on those days that have long since past.

Sunny and bright, blue fields broken by white banks of clouds on the morning
that Liz left.
Clear and empty and fading into twilight when they came for his father.
Gray and heavy and noiseless when they came for him.

Every day he studies the changes in the sky, marks the days by its moods,
and every day it’s the same.  Every day it’s still all wrong.  And every day
he looks up, waiting for the day that he won’t have to search the sky for
answers any longer.

Weighing his hopes against the meaning in the clouds and wondering what they
will have to say on the day that she comes back to him.

Waiting for the day that the sky is right again.

**
end