Title: Escape From the Abyss
Author: Zannna aka Lizzie aka Mellusene
Pairing: Liz/Logan
Rating: T
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Roswell belongs to Jason Katims et al. X-Men belongs to Marvel et al. I don't even own the idea for this fic as it is a challenge: Crossover Challenge # 16 by Jezebel Jinx on: http:/www(dot)roswellfanatics(dot)net I have also posted this story there under the name: Lizzie.
Pairing: Liz/Wolverine (Logan)
-Liz is 17 going on 18 and a mutant. (she's known since she was 9, author can decide what abilities she has.)
-Nobody (except her parents) know Liz is a mutant, but her, Maria, Alex, Jim, and Kyle know about the aliens. (just like the show.)
-Someone finds out about Liz being a mutant (People are scared and violent towards mutants). So instead of staying in Roswell, she asks her parents to send her to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.
-She has no contact with anyone from Roswell, except her parents.
-While at the school she meets Logan (author can decide if he's a teacher at the school or not.) and is instantly attracted to him.
-Liz is at the school for about 6 months. And her and Logan become close friends and have the beginnings of something more intimate. But before the relationship can go any further Liz has to go back to Roswell to help with either her sick mother or sick father.
-I would like Liz's look to change a little when she returns to Roswell. (Nothing too drastic but to have a slightly more bad-ass attitude, with some leather clothes, and at least 1 tattoo.)
-Liz and Logan talk on the phone a lot (or as ofter as they can afford)
-But Logan comes to Roswell wanting to be close to Liz
-I would also like the 'I Know An Alien' Club to gang up on Liz when she comes back to Roswell and her telling them off.
-Rating: Teen-Adult (perferably Adult, but doesn't have to be as long as it's not Child or YTeen.)
-Everything else is up to the author.
A/N: This is the only time I am posting the whole challenge, so refer back to this post in the future if need be. I am making some changes to the challenge. Most notably about the reason Liz ends up at the school, and the time line. The beginning of chapter one begins during the scene at the football field at Roswell High when Max is trying to help Liz study for her Harvard interview in Season 3 Ep.12 : Ch..Ch...Changes. The prologue is both six months after that episode and directly after that episode. The X-men verse is the movie verse after the first movie, and we will see some of the second movie but both fandoms will be AU. Cheers!
Liz POV:
I stared at the jagged hole in the roof of the high tech stealth aircraft, eyes wide and horrified. I have other friends. Ive been friends with Maria since we were kids. Ive known Isabel for a little more than three years, although that friendship was a recent development. Kyle has been my rock and a loyal friend ever since he found out about the Abyss. Hell I eve considered Micheal to be a friend, although our relationship was more like a couple of affable allies. But I was never as close to any of them as I am to Rogue.
She knows me like no one else ever has. She know everything about me. Not just a part of me like most of my other friends. She is the closest thing to a sister I have ever had. And shes gone. Just like that. The wind whipping through the cabin roared like an angry beast. There were debris flying everywhere. Was that a shoe? Time seemed to have stopped for me as I stared through that gaping tear after Rogue.
All I could think was Not again. Please God, not again. I couldn't lose another person I loved. I might go crazy this time. Heaven knows Rogue is the only reason I have remained on right side of the line of insane these past months. She couldn't leave me. I couldn't be left alone again. But she did leave me, shes gone. I continued so stare after her frozen in place. Funny how life can change so drastically in a matter of milliseconds.
Six Months Earlier:
My name is Liz Parker and I am a Mutant.
I found out when I was nine years old. I was on vacation one summer with my Grandma Claudia. I was visiting her on one of her dig sites in the Painted Desert in Northeastern Arizona and I wondered off and got lost. After several hours I started to really panic. I had no water or food, I was so thirsty and hot. I was scared I was going to die out there. I ended up so tired I could barely walk, and I kept tripping and falling on my hands in the dirt. I was wearing a sundress so my knees ended up scraped and bloody like my hands.
I eventually came upon a rock formation made out of several large boulders, and I shuffled around it looking for a good spot to rest in the shade. As I made my way to a niche between two of the boulders I tripped again and fell forward catching myself with my hands in the dirt. I felt a sharp pain in my left palm, and then I was someone else.
I was a young man crouching between the rocks waiting for what looked like a deer of some kind to come into shooting distance of my bow. I waited patiently, still as the rocks around me breathing calmly with the wind. Just as the beast came into shooting range I noticed a crack in my arrowhead. I calmly and smoothly retracted the arrow, dropped it on the ground and strung my second, and only other, arrow in my bow. I breathed in, held it. The deer turned towards me its ears swiveling frantically. I loosed the arrow and it drove home directly into the animals heart. I quickly swung my bow onto my back and made my way to my kill to make sure it was dead and not suffering. But my shot was true and the beast no longer drew breath. After I thanked the animal for its gift to me and my people, I imagined myself walking back to the village and presenting my kill to my wife. I knew she would be pleased.
As I came back to myself, I found that I was lying in the dirt in the shade of the rocks still. I felt the throbbing in my hand looked down to see what had cut it. It was a shard of rock, no bigger than a dime. I was black and shiny where my blood wetted the edge. It looked like one of the pieces of shattered tools and arrow heads I had seen at the dig site. Oddly enough I felt a bit better after my odd little daydream. I looked up at the sky and saw the sun was in a similar position as in my daydream and decided to go the same direction I imagined the village to be in. I knew time was running short and it seemed like as good a direction as any at this point. I started walking directly away from the sun, like in my dream. I felt the backs of my arms and legs warming again to that nearly unbearable heat, but I kept shuffling one foot in front of the other.
What seemed like days later, but I knew couldn't have been that long, I tripped again. This time I couldn't stand again, and had to crawl to move forward. Not too long after that I finally gave in to the exhaustion that had been weighing me down.
When I woke up I was in a hospital bed. I had a tube sticking out of each arm, and bandages over most of my body. I blinked and it felt like there was something thick and wet on my face. Like some kind of cream. I finally was able to turn my head enough to the left to see my Grandma Claudia sitting in a chair by my bed.
She told me members of a search party had found me almost two miles west of the dig site, and I had been flown by life flight to the closest children's hospital. She told me my parents were on their way, and that I was going to be alright. Grandma Claudia said that I was severely dehydrated, sunburned, and I was suffering from heat exhaustion. The bandages were covering the scrapes from my many falls, and holding medicine on my burns. The gooey stuff on my face was antibiotic burn ointment. After making sure I understood what was going on, and that I was safe now, she held up the shard of rock I had cut my hand on. She asked me where I found it, and why I had it clutched in my hand when I was found.
I trusted my Grandma Claudia more than anyone, even my parents. She always listened to me and never told me I was being silly or stupid. I also knew she was different than other Grandmas. She was special. She had what she called a gift; She was able to influence people just by her presence. She said it was like charisma, but with an extra boost. This is how she sometimes got funding, and approval for important projects that other wise wouldn't have gotten them. She said that she only used her gift for good, and only used it when it was very important. She asked me not to tell anyone, that it was our secret.
I knew she wouldn't laugh at me, and so I told her the whole story. Grandma told me that she thought that I might have a gift like hers. She didn't know exactly what it was, but she promised that we would figure it out after I was better, but that I shouldn't tell anyone. Even my parents.
My parents were there when I woke up the next morning, and they took turns with Grandma to make sure someone was always with me. After a little more than a week the doctors said I could go home. Grandma Claudia came with us back to Roswell, and she spent the rest of the summer with me to help me figure out my gift.
We figured out that I was a sort of touch telepath. When I touched something that had been touched by someone else, or that had belonged to someone else I would sometimes get flashes of these people. It could be about what they were doing when they touched the object, what they were thinking, or feeling. Sometimes it was just a random flash of something that had happened or was going to happen to them, or someone they knew. We also discovered that when there is a highly emotional event; birth, death, murder, violence, joy, pleasure; it will some times leave an imprint in the places it happened and I would sometimes pick up on it by touching an object near where it happened.
As I grew older my gift grew as well. I started reading things from touching people too. Grandma Claudia worked very hard with me to learn how to control my gift and my reactions to the information I inevitably gleaned everywhere I went. Sometimes I wish I had some kind of mental scouring pad, so I could forget some of the things I learned. We wrote letters to each other, spoke on the phone often, and she visited whenever she could.
When I was eleven Grandma finally helped me find a way to turn off my gift for long periods of time. She had spoken to a friend of hers, and he taught her some meditation techniques, that she in turn taught to me, and I was finally able to flip a switch somewhere inside my head and not get any visions for hours at a time.
After my twelfth birthday Grandma Claudia told me that her friend, a Dr. Charles Xavier, wanted me to come to his school so he could help me himself. It was decided that we would have to tell my parents everything so they would understand the reason I wanted to go away to boarding school. They completely flipped. You see my dad, for some reason, didn't ever manifest a mutation, as my parents called it. His mother, Grandma Claudia was a mutant, but he wasn't. Grandma said he still carried the gene, and that he knew it was a possibility I would manifest an ability all along. My parents decided not only would I not be going to Dr. Xavier's school, but all talk of me being a mutant was now forbidden. I was their perfect little girl with a bright future ahead of me, and there would be no more of this mutant nonsense.
Grandma Claudia and I still spoke about my gift, but we were extra careful not to let my parents find out about it. When I was sixteen I died. Well, almost. I was working in my families cafe, The Crashdown, when two men got into an argument. One of them pulled a gun, and I got shot in the stomach.
The story of how I survived is even more convoluted and crazy than the whole mutant thing! Ive kept a journal for that stuff , and I left it at home well hidden. I don't see how the people involved in this other crazy stuff knowing about my gift would help any. If anything it would bring more trouble down on us, and we have enough to deal with already! And if my own parents cant stand the fact that I'm a mutant, what would my friends think?
Shortly after I was shot Grandma had a stroke and died. Ever since then I have been dealing with my mutation on my own. As I grew older the other stuff got so bad that I decided I would have to leave Roswell. I had a huge fight with my boyfriend, and I decided I needed to be on my own for awhile. I really need to concentrate on myself, my own problems. I need to figure out who I am outside my family, and my friends. Away from Roswell and the Abyss.
ADDITIONAL DISCLAIMER: I wrote the Prologue on the 21st of July. On the 25th a toddler went missing nearish to where I wrote that Liz went missing. And on the 4th of August another toddler went missing in Arizona. By the way CNN says the two cases are unrelated. I originally wasn't going to post the Prologue until the story was finished, so I didn't' think I needed to worry about this. Then yesterday I decided to post it and forgot. So: I do not mean anything in this chapter as offensive to anyone. I don't trivialize in any way the tragedy that these people are going through. My heart goes out to the missing and their families and loved ones. Please pardon my mistake, it was not meant maliciously.