Title: "You Will Leave Me"

Author: Rebecca

Feedback: IScharlach@aol.com

Rating: PG-13

Pairing: Max and Liz

Help me.

I am falling apart.

The man (or alien) I love, my one, my only, he slept with her.....

Tess.

How is it possible for one person to cause so much pain?

Until she came, we'd found a sort of peace.

Maria and Michael, Max and I....

Isabel was still using Alex, but he was so deep in the throes of hero worship I think he knew and didn't care.

Then Tess came. She changed everything.

Suddenly Max, my Max, had a DESTINY. He- We- weren't just running from the government anymore, we were running from aliens who wanted to kill them.

Max and Michael and Isabel, our friends, weren't just aliens who crash-landed here....they were royalty. Max was a king, Isabel was a princess, Michael was his second-in-command, and Tess was his bride.

I still blame her for the FBI getting their filthy hands on Max. Naseto, her father-protector-whatever who tried to kill me, it was his fault. Max was coming to get me, but he wouldn't have had to if Naseto hadn't tricked me and kidnapped me....if I hadn't.....

I broke up with him after that. I couldn't deal. How does that saying go again? If you love someone, let them go.....something like that anyway. I loved him. I let him go.

He still didn't go to her.

After prom, after I broke up with him FOR GOOD, he kissed her. He never told me all this, I picked bits and pieces of information from various sources. He kissed her. And after that, not long after that, he....

I can't bear to think about it. Every time I picture him, I see them wrapped around each other, around and in each other......oh, God, I can't take this. My heart will break.

Even knowing this was all a stupid plan of hers to get pregnant so she could take them all home and then turn them in doesn't help. It just shows how well she knew him, before she even met him. She Knew Him. I'm afraid now, afraid I'll never know him like she did, which is stupid and irrational, but if she hadn't killed Alex, one of my best friends, and by the way I will never forgive her for that, then he would have gone with her.

We're taking it slow, trying to work through stuff, but I know. I see the look in his eyes sometimes, when he leaves my side to stare at the night sky and trace the patterns of the stars into his memory. I know that he is not all here, not fully mine, but in the middle somewhere, and I can't reach him.

He wants to find his son. I can understand that, I even respect it, but I wonder sometimes, and the questions leads to fear. Every step towards his son takes him one step further from me. Every time another pathway closes, every time another possible lead is rendered useless, I stare at him and wish I could see what he was feeling. The flashes I get now disturb rather than please me-they are flashes of a world that once belonged to him and could again. It is a world I will never visit, except in dreams.

One day he will go. He will simply pack up and leave me, take off into the sky with a determined expression on his face and that cute little thing he does with his brow when he's trying to solve a puzzle, and I will never see him again.

That's the way things are. I can't change that. All I can do is make the most of whatever time we have, time when he is still mine.

So when he gets up at night, I don't say anything. I simply walk onto the balcony and stand beside him, and we watch the stars together until the light of morning floods

the horizon.

Title: Why I Still Love Her

Author: Rebecca

Feedback: IScharlach@aol.com

Rating: PG-13

Pairing: Max/Liz

"Liz?"

"Hmm?" She asks, lifting her head and meeting my eyes. I stare dumbfounded for a moment, newly struck by how incredibly beautiful she is. My eyes brush over her lovely face, and I remember how those soft, full lips felt pressed against mine. I take in every detail, the curve of her waist, the silky smooth of her cheeks, her wide brown eyes possessing such innocence, despite all they've seen, all we've seen together....I trace the darkness of her hair that always seemed to smell wonderful, like cinnamon, like her. And I remember when I was allowed to touch her without this wall that exists between us.

For a moment I can almost hate Tess. Tess, Naseto, Ava. I hardly even remember her, I don't WANT to remember her, but this is all her fault. Easy to blame her, far easier than admitting that any of the fault is mine, or Liz's, or Isabel's, or anyone I love's fault.

If I try hard, sometimes at night I can almost picture her in my mind. My teenage bride, my sister's best friend, my love. She shared her violet eyes with Tess, but that was all. She was slight and sweet and kind, with a voice that seemed to caress me, and I can almost remember how it felt to hold her.....

But that was a long time ago. I am not a King. I am Max Evans, high school junior madly in love with Liz Parker. Liz is a part of me, a part of the person and alien I am now. How can Tess ask me to give that up? How can she come here and say, "oh, by the way, the four of us aliens have been engineered so we can go save our home world from the evil people, and you're supposed to love me and Michael's supposed to love Isabel. It doesn't matter that all three of you are currently in relationships; what's a human relationship compared to destiny? You say you love someone else? Well, too bad, because this square will give you dreams that will make all of you remember what it was like, and I'll give you fantasies of me until you think you're going insane." That's how it was, for me anyway. I feel sorry for Tess, I feel protective of Tess, I feel a strange connection to Tess, but that's it.

Sometimes I get so mad I want to punch a hole through something. How dare she? How dare she look at me with hope lying naked in her eyes every time I say anything even remotely nice, every time I say anything that leads to us being alone in the same room, every time I look at her when I don't have to? She's manipulative, she's cold, she doesn't really see what the problem is with killing innocent people....and yet. She's sooo innocent. She told me once that she's never so much as kissed a boy, never been held, never been touched. Naseto never even hugged her, saying the contact would make her too human. She'd been raised to love an alien king who didn't exist, and was now futilely trying to find traces of him in me.

We've tried to integrate her into our lives, but we could have tried harder. It's been just the three of us so long that it's hard to let anyone else in, even an alien. Liz and Alex and Maria are our friends, our boyfriend and girlfriends, the people we love and trust more than anyone else born on this planet including our parents....but it's hard for them to understand what it's like for us-running from the FBI, afraid all the time, growing up wondering when we would have to leave Roswell, and that they would hunt us down when we did.....knowing that sooner or later we would be caught and killed, and powerless to stop it. Everything we know about who we are and where we came from we've learned in the last year and a half. And everything I know about love, I learned from Liz.

They say there is no such thing at first site, but they're wrong. The first time I saw Liz, she was playing with her friends on the playground in front of the school. Her mouth was open, and she was laughing about something with her friends. I saw her immediately, just picked her out from the crowd of kids standing there. I saw her and my perception of the world changed. It was strange and rather unsettling.

I tried to stay away from her over the years. We were friends, but it was casual; I never told her that I was in love with her, had in fact been in love with her since I was old enough to understand the concept. I'd see her walking down the halls and feel a rush of joy when I realized the person she was smiling at was me.

I hated Kyle. I hated everything about him. The way his arm curled around her waist; the ownership he claimed when she wore his jacket; the way her smiles seemed to be for him now, and him alone. I'd watch them kiss and wish desperately to any gods I knew the name of that once, just once in my life it would be me standing there with my arms around her, me leaning in to whisper in her ear, my lips fused against hers. And then I'd shake it off, because there was nothing that could lead to but heartache.

It's funny how everything can change in an instant. You can spend your life telling yourself you'd never risk the people you love, but then the moment comes and you have no other choice. That gunshot rang out, and I knew even before she fell that it was Liz that had been hurt. Don't ask me how I knew, I just did. I also knew that Michael was right and I couldn't heal her, because that would expose us, but what choice did I have? The girl I loved was dying, and I would not sit by and let it happen when I could save her.

I healed her. She wouldn't accept my contrived theories of the angle of her fall and the shock she was probably in; of course she wouldn't, Liz is a scientist. She's no idiot. So I finally did what I'd sworn not to do-tell her the truth.

It didn't take long before Maria was in on the secret. The two of them helped us throw Valenti off the trail. And later, when Polaski came and Alex found out, they actually proved invaluable in keeping our secret. Liz was right, it wasn't just the three of us anymore, it was the six of us. We were a family, in some ways. But there was always that little niggling thing that wouldn't leave my mind, the irrational worry that something would happen to her because of me. It wouldn't leave me alone.

We got together for a while, and I can safely say it was the most wonderful few months of my life. Then we broke up, and I was heartbroken. And then we were together again, and she had the flashes, and everything just sort of blew up when Tess came....I have no defense. I kissed Tess. I don't know why. I didn't love her, and I don't love her now. But she understands parts of me that Liz will never be able to fathom, no matter how much she loves me, because they're parts that belong solely to another world and another man/alien she never knew. Only Tess knows what it's like to find out you were the ruler of an entire planet that has been reincarnated to go and save your people. It's a huge burden, and she couldn't bear any of it, no matter how much she might have wanted to.

And now here we are. She slept with Kyle. My mind knows that what I saw was true, but my heart......I can't believe she would do that, I just don't, because I know her and she's not that type of person......but she did. She Did.

I snap back to reality. She's looking at me quizzically; I realize several minutes have ticked by while I've been staring at her and quickly move my eyes to the floor. There's one question I need to ask her, but I don't know how to say it. But I have to say it.

"Did you sleep with Kyle?"

Her eyes widen, and I can see her swallow. Her already pale cheeks grow even lighter, and her right hand starts to tremble. She grabs it with her left and shoves it under the blanket. She looks at me, and nods.

My face collapses. I dig my nails into my palms so hard I create scratches, but right now the physical pain is a welcome distraction, however slight, from the pain the slight indication of her head has caused in my heart.

"Oh," I hear from a voice my own and not my own. I turn and walk away. Questions crowd my mind, but I can't voice any of them without letting loose the tears I've been holding back. I don't look back until I'm out of her sight.

She's staring out the window and into the sheets of rain pouring down. A tear slides down her cheek and glitters on the couch before she gets up and pulls the window shade down. I walk off down the long hall and try to figure out why-why she slept with him, why she seemed to almost want me to catch them, and most of all why I still love her so much.