Two Sides of the Coin
Rating: Teen/Mature
Disclaimer: Roswell belongs to first to Melinda Metz, then to Jason Katims and 20th Century Fox. She created them; they killed them. I'm just borrowing them.
She could feel him watching her. She didn't know who he was, or where he was, but he was watching her, day and night.
"I'm leaving Michael," she said. "It's time."
"Liz, Max would have wanted you to stay with us," Michael answered.
"What Max would have wanted is immaterial, Michael. In case you've forgotten, he's dead."
Michael flinched at the harshness of her words. She was right. Max was dead, and it was his fault.
After they fled the gym on that fateful graduation night, the Special Unit had followed them as they made their way out of town. Someone, Michael could only assume they were a part of the Special Unit, forced his motorcycle off the road. He survived the crash, Max didn't. Isabel reacted in typical Isabel way, she yelled and screamed and cried. Liz – Liz got quiet. She withdrew into herself and didn't talk to anybody for a long time.
He didn't know which was harder, telling Liz and Isabel what had happened, or getting in that damned microvan and leaving, knowing they'd never see Max again.
"Michael, I have to do this," Liz sighed. "Max is dead, he's not coming back, and seeing all of you, day after day, just makes it harder to bear. I need to get on with my life – or start a new life. But I can't do that if I'm hanging on to the remnants of my old life."
Nothing anybody could say could dissuade Liz from her decision to leave, and on a brisk fall morning, she climbed aboard a bus heading east. She changed busses, routes and direction several times, but she could never shake the feeling that someone was watching her. Her seatmate asleep, Liz reached into her backpack and extracted her journal. This wasn't her original journal; that had been sent back to her father, with the request that he burn it and spread it's ashes on the graves of Max and Alex. Before she sent it to her father, she made a copy. She couldn't stand to be without it for in it was her life with Max.
She flipped through journal, skimming pages. This time, she wasn't looking for memories of Max. This time, she was trying to find when it started, this feeling of being watched. She thought maybe if she could pinpoint when the feelings began, she might be able to find a clue as to what was going on.
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat, her body stiff from sitting so long. She craned her neck, trying to see past the sleeping man next to her. She spied an empty pair of seats several rows back and she gathered up her belongings and carefully stood up. Liz climbed over the man, praying that the bus would remain steady. Once in the narrow aisle, she released the breath she hadn't been aware she was holding and walked toward the empty seats. Just before she sat down, she felt the familiar eerie feeling. She looked around, looking at the passengers nearby, but nobody looked familiar.
Warily, she took her seat and opened her journal again and began to read. The first time she'd felt like someone was watching her was when Future Max came. Back then, she'd attributed the feeling to him, he had, after all, been watching her. But after he left, the feeling persisted. She seldom gave it any real thought, but she did jot it down in her journal each time it occurred. There had been so much going on in her life during that time, all of it Max related. She spent so little time focusing on herself. Everything was always Max or alien centric.
After Max died, she became very introspective. Maybe withdrawn was a better word. She shut everybody else out, and focused entirely on herself. As a result she became more aware of her feelings, including the feeling that somebody was watching her. It was happening with alarming frequency, and that was the real reason she wanted to leave the group. If someone was following her, she didn't to put the others in any danger.
Liz continued reading the journal, noting all the different occasions where she felt as if someone was watching her. She reached into her bag and withdrew another notebook and a pencil and began to make notes. After a short time, a pattern emerged. The feelings were prevalent almost constantly, but they were strongest during the times when Max was not around.
She checked and rechecked her notes, but there it was, in black and white. Each and every time Max was away from Roswell, the feelings were the strongest. She wondered if it was some kind of alien power that Max didn't realize he had. Tired, Liz closed her eyes and leaned her head against the window, trying to make sense of it all. Within minutes, her weary body drifted off to sleep.
She was walking alone down a dark road. Moonlight filtered through the trees that lined the road, casting shadows on the road. A noise up ahead caught her attention and she looked up to see a familiar figure walking toward her. He stopped several feet away, so that his face was hidden in the shadows. "Max, is that you?" she called. He turned back to look, and her heart lurched in excitement. It was Max. "I'm not Max," the shadow voice whispered in her mind. "And he is not me. We are two sides to one coin. The same, yet different. I am him, and he is me, but we are not each other. If I look in a mirror, I will see Max, but I am not Max." "I don't understand," Liz said. "Are you the Max from the Future?" "No. No more questions, Liz. Just know that I am near, and I'm watching over you. I will protect you." "Wait, please, won't you tell me who you are, really?" The figure turned, and a shaft of moonlight hit his arm, and Liz's eyes focused on a familiar tattoo. A square with four circles, one at each corner, connected by intersecting lines. Liz reached out to touch it, but the image shifted, and she found herself in the cave back on the reservation. She saw the Antarian images on the wall, one of them the same foursquare pattern. Again she reached out to touch it, but the image melted, and she was standing in the back doorway of the CrashDown, looking at the figure of a girl trying to sleep on the ground. "Ava," she whispered. Her dream shifted again, and she was sitting at the counter of the CrashDown, and Ava was next to her crying. The image shifted again, and this time she was watching herself comforting Ava. "Zan," she heard Ava cry. "They killed Zan."
Liz woke with a start, shaking with fear, struggling to remember what her dream had been about. She picked up her journal from the seat beside her to write down her dream when her eyes fell to an image that had not been there before - the foursquare pattern.