A/N: I decided to stop being a chicken and just post. I recently had a Roswell marathon and it sparked my long lost love for Michael and Maria. I have many more ideas and am thinking I want to continue this, but for now this is it. Please be gentle it's my first.
It had been five years.
Maria was still waitressing at the Crashdown Café. She was singing at bars on the weekends, sad attempt at a step towards her music career. She had her own apartment now, her other option had been to move in with her mother and Jim. It didn't even feel like they were her family. She felt like she had lost her family.
Michael had left her and then followed every one else. He had ended their less than epic romance with a confusing confession of undying love. For once she hadn't gotten to say her piece and he had just ridden off without her. The FBI alien hunters attacked at Graduation. Max had been targeted first, Isabel had seen it and died protecting him. Max and Liz had ended up getting away then they ran away just like they had planned. And that was the last Maria had ever seen of an alien. The last three years of her life wasted, without a goodbye from her own best friend. That had left Kyle, who had been her only rock through the first year of their abandonment, but when the alien side effects started to kick in for him he couldn't handle it and killed himself. This continued to impact her mother who struggled care for a devastated Jim. Everyone she loved was dead, gone, or destroyed.
Maria was left to clean up the mess that was Liz's parents. Things had never been the same with them after Max and Liz left town. They never truly believed Maria when she said that she didn't know where their daughter had gone. She wished they could see she share their grief, worry and betrayal. She often wondered why she still had her job at the Crashdown. She must be a constant reminder to the Parkers of they're missing daughter.
She didn't have friends. No one new ever moved to Roswell other than alien chasers, which she wanted nothing to do with. Anyone she knew before the aliens had taken over her life she had long ago isolated herself from. She spent her time alone, it was better that way. When Kyle had still been alive she had barely been good enough company for her.
Maria wished she could hate them for leaving her. If she could hate Michael then maybe somehow, she could move on. Instead she was caught in this existence, barely passing for a life. After Kyle died she had taken up drinking too much, not that she hadn't drank before. She drank a bit in high school at parties, and her and Kyle would drink to make their time more bearable in an almost social way. Now her only pass time was Jack Daniels and making heartbreaking music, and an odd amount of Bewitched reruns.
She still dreamed about him most nights. Sometimes she would relive they're whole stupid story, but the happy memory dreams hurt more than the bad ones. Usually dreamed about him coming back. In the earlier years she had dreamed about him coming back to get her, he would apologize and they would leave together. More recently she dreamed about being about to tell him how nothing in her life had worked out and it was entirely his fault. She told herself that she wished she had never met him. On really bad days she would sometimes wish Max had let Liz die that day.
Maria often wondered how she had become a shell of her former self. How come she had never been able to get over the loss of Michael? She used to blame it on the fact that he was an alien and somehow she had wrecked her, like once she'd been loved by an alien nothing would ever compare. She truly believed now that there was just something wrong with her.
After leaving Roswell Michael just kept moving. After five years he had seen most of the Western United States, too scared to stay in once place. When his bike had first failed him, just outside some shit town he could barely remember the name of he had needed money for a car so he worked in a kitchen for a couple months. This started his trend, whenever he would run out of money or just liked a placed a little more he would stop and work. He would usually work in a kitchen.
Michael's current stop was in Montana, a town called Fairview on the boarder with North Dakota. He liked Montana. The mountains felt a bit familiar, almost like the rocks out in the desert that surrounded Roswell but bigger. He'd offered to work in the kitchen at a restaurant attached to a hotel but the owner, Ryan, had thought his faced would bring in the ladies and had him bartend. Michael had insisted he was better at cooking, he'd rather not be so noticed for obvious reasons, but Ryan wouldn't hear of it.
Part of Michael had thought about just moving on, he had no reason to do what the older man asked. He stayed and worked in the bar. It was safe to admit he was beginning to feel the loneliness. And Montana had enough tourism, people were always coming and going. His shitty attitude mixed with the charm he had could muster when the moment suited him actually worked for in his joke of a job. The women did like a misunderstood moody stranger, he made good money and even found ways to pass the time some nights.
The casual nights with desperate women were starting to make him feel worse though. At first they had been a needed distraction, who didn't like sex? It began to make him think of Maria and the time they had hooked up after she found about being discovered by the talent scout from New York. The empty feeling casual sex had left him now, was that what Maria had felt in the moments after? Usually that train of thought wouldn't last long, he knew better, what they had was real. He knew he loved her because of the gaping hole he felt all the time. Everyday he would think Maria would like that, or Maria would roll her eyes with him over this, or Maria would yell at him for that.
Michael spent most of his time trying to not miss Maria uncontrollably. They had a connection, and he thought if he could control it eventually she could forget him and move on. But in those moments when he was too weak to keep his guard up and he could feel her reaching out unknowingly to him, missing him. Every time she would reached him he felt her heart break, and then his own.
Even though Michael had never liked talking, but he missed talking to Max. Hell, he missed Max's over bearing 'I'm telling you what to do without telling you what to do' tone. He missed Isabel's 'I'm actually telling you what to do' tone. Mostly he missed just hanging out with them, like before Liz and the Crashdown shooting, when they would just watch bad TV or when being an alien was fun and they were first discovering what they're powers could do. Some times he wished that Max had never saved Liz, he would have Max and Isabel and he wouldn't miss Maria, we wouldn't even know to miss Maria.
After five years of this he wondered about his decisions. He hadn't seen an FBI agent since Roswell, he used to believe it was from his own carefulness. Now he believed that he was simply unimportant. Why would they chase him when Max and Isabel were out there? That would mean he had left Maria behind for no reason.