The morning before the farewell party, Max went into his sister's bedroom, and saw Isabel sitting on her bed, looking at pictures from a family album, and brushing tears off of her face. "This... this is getting to be uncomfortably familiar."

Isabel smiled. Of course she remembered what it had been like when they'd been getting ready to leave in the Granilith for Antar, thinking that it'd be the four of them - Max, Isabel, Michael, and Tess - and that they'd be gone for years if not forever. Of course, things had changed, so quickly and so confusingly that Max still couldn't wrap his brain around them comfortably, and he had stayed, while his sister and his oldest friend ferried Tess and the baby off-planet - and came back. "Yeah, well." Isabel sighed. "You got everything all ready for the formal affair?"

"Yeah, tux is rented - Liz said that she doesn't want to bother doing flowers, so that's pretty much it. What about you?"

"Oh, my gown's all ready," she said. "I really, really hope that Alex likes it." Isabel looked around the room, as if adding another string of pictures to a mental file to save and cherish. "I... I'd have liked to have him get me a corsage, but... well, with nobody else interested in doing it; I decided that - that it seemed weird." She shrugged.

"Maybe you should tell him you've changed your mind," Max suggested. "Nobody else cares about you being weird - not tonight of all nights. You should do whatever it takes to get it perfect." He had to rub his arm slightly - Isabel had cuffed him one when he'd said the part that implied she was definitely weird. "And... and Alex won't mind getting them for you."

"Well, he won't complain," Isabel agreed. "He might even enjoy the fact that it pleases me. But it'd be a huge hassle to go out and get them at this point, and I know he's busy packing up and clearing anything alien-related off of his computer, and things that he just doesn't really want to worry about other people snooping in after we're gone." She sighed. "Apparently, you have to be really thorough to keep other people from figuring out what was in a file you delete off your computer."

"Yeah, I've heard that - if those other people are smart and thorough themselves," Max said with a slight smile. "So... are you sure about not leaving anything for Mom and Dad to find... a note, a recorded CD, anything to explain to them why we had to go?"

"Uhh... yeah," Isabel said. "After... after last time, I... I could hardly even figure out what to write without breaking down into tears, I think. And - and we don't really know what to say to them, do we now? If we say we're going forever, then we might be able to come back in a few weeks, and it'd be really awkward. And - and if we say it'll only be a little while - and then, and then..."

"Yep, I realize that," Max agreed. "Though... if we come back after saying nothing at all, it'll still be awkward," he pointed out, and Isabel giggled slightly. "Well... is it okay if I write a really short note, not saying much? I... I don't know what I'd say either, but I just think some warning might be better than nothing."

"Umm, sure," Isabel said after taking a long moment to think about it.

"Alright." Max hurried over to Isabel and gave her a big hug. He was a little surprised at the impulse - they weren't generally that huggy a family, but it was just something that he had to do right then. "I... I hope you and Alex have a great time tonight."

"Oh, we will," Isabel replied. "Don't worry about that." She looked up at him - and wiped her eyes dry again. "The same thing goes for you and Liz. So we'll pick Alex up around quarter to, and then go over to the Crashdown?"

"Umm, sure, sounds good to me," Max said. "I... I'm going to go check my own computer, actually."

"Good idea." Isabel giggled. "We wouldn't want mom and dad to find those torrid, nearly obscene love letters that you write and never actually send to anyone."

"They're... they're not nearly obscene," Max spluttered. "Just... well, I was shooting for 'erotic', and why were you snooping around on my computer in the first place?"

"Umm, looking for some spare space to store Charmed video files," Isabel replied. Max shook his head and hurried away.

#

Max pulled into the parking lot of the Crashdown Cafe, got out from behind the driver's seat, and had just turned the corner of the building, heading for the front door of the dining room when he heard a couple of different voices yelling at him. One was Isabel's - she had been in the back seat, along with Alex. The other voice was up from about ten feet above the parking lot, where Liz was standing on the 'balcony' ledge outside her bedroom window, waving at him. "Hey, I'll be down in a minute. Meet me at the side door."

Max jogged toward her, drinking in the way Liz's permed hair was blowing in the evening breeze, and the rich blue fabric clung to what he could see of her body. "Why don't you climb down the ladder?" he asked playfully.

"Not in a dress this nice - err, not again," Liz said. Max smiled slightly, remembering the valentine's day a year and a half ago when he'd accidentally gotten drunk, and Liz, (in the middle of a formal date that the local radio station had set up as part of a publicity stunt contest,) had spirited him away to keep him from blowing his own secret until things calmed down, except that he didn't sober up from waiting around. "Just - just give me a minute."

Max went over to the small side door out of the back of the cafe into the parking lot, which customers weren't supposed to use but a lot of them did, including all of Liz's friends. The idea flitted through his mind that Liz might have also refused to climb down the ladder just because she was wearing a dress, but her blue formal gown turned out to be a long one, and fitted in such a way that he thought she probably wouldn't have had any difficulties on the ladder either from a mobility or an exposure point of view - but then, Max didn't really know that much about girls' clothes, of course.

"Hi," Liz said, smiling in that unbelievably cute way that she had that made her cheeks dimple, but only the very slightest bit. "You look very handsome like that, Max."

"Ehh, all I tried to do was match," Max said. Liz had said that she'd be wearing deep royal blue, so he'd managed to find a rental tux in dark blue. The shade wasn't quite the same, unfortunately, but overall Max thought that they complimented each other nicely. Liz's hair was curlier than usual, as Max had noticed earlier, but there were also two braids or tails running down either side of the back of her head, overtop the loose hair - it was an oddly exotic touch, and one that Max quite liked the effect of. Her gown was fairly simple but beautiful - thin shoulder straps that were probably just a bit too big to be described with the word 'spaghetti', a V-neckline that was just low enough to tease without being obvious about it, and quite a lot of gentle hugging of the curves of Liz's figure. That was the dress, which was hugging her curves - at least, for now. Max laughed to himself softly at that thought. "You're ravishing tonight, my darling."

"Then maybe you should ravish me before midnight," Liz whispered in Max's ear, and then turned away from him to sashay over to the car. Max recovered from his shock at her words just in time to see Liz shaking her tight ass at him ever so slightly, before she got to the car and sat in the shotgun seat. Max tried to keep his mind and his blood from racing as he walked over to the car himself. He and Liz had flirted a lot over the two years that they'd known each other, obviously, but he didn't think that she had ever said anything so clearly suggestive to him before. Did she mean it? Was this... he cut off that line of thought as he climbed back into the car himself. "Okay, boys and girls," Liz gushed. "Are we ready to party down?"

"I think I'd rather party up," Alex joked. "Or maybe just rock the night away."

"Whatever you want, babe," Isabel replied softly.

"Hey, Izzie," Liz said, turning slightly in her seat to face the other girl, as Max started the car again and began to drive. "I love your outfit - Lady in red again?"

"Well, come on - what else am I going to do, with this guy so crazy about it," and Isabel reached out to take an affectionate hold of Alex's shoulder. "He's probably going to have me wearing red for every big event of our lives... assuming that we get to spend our lives together, I mean."

"Ooh, even the wedding day?" Liz teased. "No white wedding gown for you?"

"No, definitely she'll get to wear white on that day," Alex joked back. "That's always assuming that I'm lucky enough to actually etcetera etcetera. I don't think I'd get a say in that."

"No, you wouldn't," Isabel agreed. "But I'm not absolutely sure that I'll want a traditional wedding with a white gown and all." She sighed. "It's so long in the future, anyway."

"And, even though I do like how you look in red," Alex continued, "It... it does lose a little bit of its magic if you use it on every special occasion, and wear it a lot of the rest of the time, just because." Isabel turned to look at him. "It's up to you, of course. But... but I think I'd like to see you in other colors a bit more of the time. Like maybe purple, for my big Sterling rose fan." Isabel smiled slightly. "After all, nobody's yet invented a color that could diminish your beauty by a single drop."

"Oh please," Liz laughed. "What about puke green?" Isabel looked up at her with a hint of a glare, but Liz had become completely immune to Isabel's glares by this point, unless she put some serious hostility into them.

Isabel's dress was quite striking even aside from its bright red color. It certainly looked very different from Liz's fairly traditional formal gown. The red fabric covered her shoulders, reaching up to her neck in a high color and stretching down her arms almost to the wrists - however, there was a small, tasteful, but suggestive hole appearing just around her stomach area, and two others on the side of her torso several inches below her arms, thus revealing skin around her impressively large chest from every direction except the usual angle of approach from above. The skirt was also on the short side, ending about midway between butt and knees, allowing long stretches of fit and smooth legs to be seen between the hem and the heels. Alex hadn't gotten the full effect of the outfit yet, since Isabel had already been in the car when they'd picked him up, and Max made a mental note to take a look at his friend's face when he first saw Isabel stand up and walk in her dress. (That would be better than watching his sister himself, after all.)

It wasn't a long drive to their eventual destination. Alex's eyes popped just about as wide as Max had expected when the moment came, and Isabel giggled and leaned close to whisper something in his ear that Max entirely didn't want to hear. Her ponytail fell this way and that when she laughed a moment later - Isabel's hairstyle, also, was very different from Liz's, just that simple ponytail, which oddly made her look like the fairytale princess that she'd always insisted that she didn't want to be - at least, not an alien fairytale princess. Max took Liz's arm in his, turning away from his sister and her date, and headed up to the door of the simple bungalow house, on the 'comfortable' side rather than 'affluent', but Max liked it.

"Hi, Max." Before he could knock, the door had been opened by a striking woman in her mid-thirties. "Why, Liz, you look gorgeous, and guys, your colors match so well." Amy DeLuca, Maria's mother, leaned close to Liz and whispered "I hope that this night goes as well as prom did badly." Max hoped that too, not that he was terribly worried about it.

Amy Deluca was younger than the parents of any of Max's other friends, which probably said a lot about her family's history. Max didn't know all of the details - in fact, he had never managed to find out much about Maria's father except that he had left town when she was young. But it was clear that Amy had found herself having a baby before she was quite out of her teenage years, and a lot of the restrictions she tried to put on her daughter's social life, and of their fights about that, had their roots in Amy's fears about Maria repeating her mistakes when it came to men, and an attempt to head those kind of problems off at the pass. Maria's relationship with Michael hadn't done too much to reassure her on that score.

"Hi, Mrs Deluca," Max said, as they were waved inside. "So nice of you to... wow!" No effort had been spared in turning the DeLuca living-dining room into a fitting dance floor, from the extra speakers hooked up to the CD player stereo, extra lights put up, and decorations on the wall. Most of the regular furniture had been moved out, even. Max looked around, taking it all in, and caught the eye of Jim Valenti, Kyle's father, once the sheriff of Roswell until he'd lost his job by covering for Max's and Isabel's secrets at the wrong time - and Amy's current romantic interest, to the discomfort of both Maria and Kyle. Mister Valenti was also dressed up nicely for the party, as was Amy, Max realized belatedly.

"Alex, come on in," Amy was saying, meanwhile. "And Isabel... wow. That's - that's quite a dress, dear; be careful with those holes." Isabel just laughed at this comment, which was not a particularly good way of being careful with the holes - but then, in Max's opinion, if Isabel wanted to be careful, she would probably not have picked a dress with holes in the first place. Max couldn't make up his mind whether to feel that Alex was lucky or have sympathy for him - of course, the emotional disconnect that he'd require to stop seeing Isabel as his sister and view her through Alex's eyes made things complicated, and Max decided to not even try.

"Who... who else is here?" he asked. Only the six of them seemed to be in the living room area, as well as Max could make out through the unfamiliar lights.

"Well, Maria's around of course, but she's hiding out upstairs," Amy replied. "She wants to make a big entrance down the stairway once Michael is here." Liz nodded knowingly in agreement to this. "And, umm, and Ava and Rath haven't shown up yet." Something in Amy's tone made it clear that she still wasn't sure what to make of those two people.

"Right," Alex said from behind Max. "And what can you tell us about Kyle?"

"Umm, he's probably sulking in the kitchen," Jim replied. "May not be very good company tonight - for some of the obvious reasons. I... I suggested that maybe he should just catch a movie or go out for a drive, but apparently that was the wrong thing to say. He insisted on coming."

"Alright." Max said, and turned to Liz. A familiar song had started on the sound system - a song that had some odd associations for them, involving a horse on a deserted county road, and his first ever trip to the hospital, but there were no horses around here, so he should be fine. "Dance with me?"

"Whatever you say," Liz breathed, and effortlessly slipped into his arms. They stepped around on the kitchen side of the room, and Max felt more and more of his world starting to slip into Liz's big wide eyes. "I... I can't get over what it was like to communicate with the Granilith like that yesterday," Liz admitted. "Did... did you realize that we weren't talking in English?"

"What?" Max blinked in surprise. "What was it then, like the alien language - Antarian?"

"I... I'm not sure," Liz admitted. "It might have been a mix between our own human language and the internal dialect of the Granilith's computer - that would make an odd kind of sense." She sighed. "And... and it knew me. It called me by name, while it didn't seem to even understand that much about Alex and Maria. Did... did it know about that through Isabel, or from its own sources?"

"Couldn't tell you," Max said. "I was wondering that kind of thing myself, about some of the things Ava was telling it." He shook his head. "In a way, it almost seems a shame that we only got a look at what the Granilith could really do when we were in the middle of sending it away." He paused. "Maybe Tess never even needed Alex's help with that stupid book. If she'd gathered us all up into the chamber and used the crystal key, could she have triggered interface mode that way? Could the Granilith have told us itself what the book said?"

"Maybe," Liz replied, a little tense now that the subject of Tess Harding had been raised again. "But... but then she wouldn't have been able to control the information, like she could because Alex had done it for her secretly." Max nodded in somber agreement. "So... are you all packed?"

"I... I've got a few things ready to go tomorrow," Max admitted. "The thing is, I'm not sure what to pack for this. A weekend, a week away, I'd have some idea. But... but we don't..." His voice broke, and it was a few seconds before he could actually compose himself enough to speak. "We don't know how long we'll be gone - or even if we'll be able to come back."

Liz nodded slowly. "Yeah, I guess that's true. I've been struggling with that too - and with the fact that we're going to have to travel fairly light if speed is an issue. There's..." Liz gulped. "There's all kinds of stuff in my room, over my whole house, with enough sentimental value I can hardly bear to leave it behind, but I know that I can't take it all if it has no practical value." Max was silent a long moment, unsure how to comfort her if just holding Liz in his arms like this wasn't enough.

Just then, though, there was a knock at the door, audible even over the music, and Liz pulled him back towards the stairway. "Maybe that's Michael," she said, excitement completely distracting her from the angst of packing, "and we'll get to see Maria's dress now. She didn't even show it to me!"

"Oh, really?" Max asked. But when Mister Valenti opened the door, it quickly became obvious that the new arrival was not Michael - but Ava and Rath, which technically made them two new arrivals - whatever. Rath looked very different from how Max usually saw him, dressed up in a formal outfit, and actually seemed startlingly similar to how Michael would have looked in the same clothes - mostly uncomfortable about the 'monkey suit.' As if to compensate for this similarity of demeanour, Rath had darkened his hair so that it was nearly as deep a brown as Max's own. Ava was wearing a little white slip dress, fairly low cut and a bit shorter than Liz's, though otherwise similar in lines - strapless and sleeveless. Amy seemed to disapprove of it slightly, but Ava didn't even notice the older woman's reaction. She rushed over to Liz and the two of them started talking very excitedly in a stream of rapid-fire questions and answers that Max couldn't quite follow, given the music. He smiled a little awkwardly at Rath, who just shrugged as if to say 'They're chicks. They'll come back once they've finished jawing at each other. Better this than Ava tries to talk her head off at me like that.' (Of course, Max might have been reading far too much into that shrug.)

There was more dancing once Ava and Liz had caught up, and then Liz pulled Max to the couch, which had been pushed into the first-floor hallway, mostly out of sight from the dance floor but still within range of the music, and the two of them started to make out furiously, indulging some of the passions that had been building up from moving to the music together more openly. Mister Valenti caught them at it, right when Liz had her hand down the back of Max's tuxedo pants and Max was managing, at the same moment, to nibble lightly on the skin of Liz's shoulder, (which meant that the two of them were in a slightly unlikely pose to make both of these activities possible.) Displaying an incredible level of tact and composure, Jim managed to discretely hint that they should either go back out to the dance floor, either to dance or mingle, or go into the kitchen, where they could grab snacks or keep Kyle company. Liz helped Max straighten himself out and they headed off to the kitchen.

The snacks that Mrs DeLuca had picked up were about as unwholesome as the things that Max and Liz had been doing to each other in the hallway, or more so - and nearly as delicious: original Twinkies, miniature glazed donuts, and little chocolate caramel morsels. But Kyle didn't seem to want any company, so they wished him a happy evening and headed back out, just in time to catch Michael's belated arrival, and Maria's much-anticipated entrance.

The dramatic tension was heightened by a spotlight that had somehow been rigged to start shining at the top of the stairs and follow her as she slowly stepped down each one. She was so brightly lit that Max thought the others who had been in the living room were probably having their eyes hurt to look at her. (The kitchen had been lit more brightly.) He had to admit that Maria looked very lovely in her black dress though - it was another fairly typical high school dance dress like Liz's as far as he could tell, with full shoulders and one of those vaguely heart-shaped necklines, a hem a little past her knees, and slits up the sides for both legs, though not terribly long ones. She was wearing black high-heeled boots, not too high, which seemed incongruous at first but somehow managed to work well with the dress, and her golden brown hair was severely straight and let down behind her. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Maria stepped out of the spotlight, (which could only follow her so far, it seemed, and after a few seconds switched itself off,) embraced Michael and kissed him. "Glad you finally got here."

"Maybe I should stop showing up to this kind of party late," Michael replied with a big smile. "Did you wear those big boots so that it wouldn't hurt if I stepped on your toes?"

"That's one benefit," Maria said sexily, and led him off into the living room.

#

About an hour and a half later, the novelty of this party was definitely palling for Max, and even the sensation of having Liz dancing in his arms, her body moving against him, was starting to become more frustrating than exactly delightful. That was about when Liz leaned close and whispered, "I want to make an exit too. Can you ask Isabel and Alex to find themselves another way home?"

Max blinked slightly. "Maybe I can at that. You wanna get home early, and rest up for the trip tomorrow?" he teased her.

"Definitely not," Liz replied, which was about in line with what Max had expected. But what she said next was definitely not expected. "I, umm... I actually made a reservation for us, at - at the tumbleweed inn."

"Wow," he replied. "Umm... don't you think that's kind of putting a lot of pressure on me?" Max grinned as charmingly as he could. "What if I'm not ready to... to-?"

"Stop it right there, bud," Liz said, her voice carrying a tone of sharpness that was belied by the love-struck smile on her face. "After what you did with 'she who shall not be named', you lost any right to be coy about sex - regardless of whether it was entirely voluntary on your part or not. I love you, and if I want you in my bed, I get you. Is that very well understood?"

Max blinked in surprise. "I like it when you go take-charge on me," he admitted. "Okay, I'll go find Alex and Isabel if you want." Liz swung him around to the side - Max had thought that he was leading, but that was probably as much of an illusion as any man has when he thinks that he's in charge of the girl that he loves - and Max bumped into someone else dancing.

"Oh, look - there they are," Liz said, giggling.

"Umm, yes, we are," Isabel said, her face frowning a little at the interruption of whatever private moment she and Alex were having when Max jostled Alex. Isabel lifted her head away from Alex's shoulder, and somehow he could tell that she had felt very comfortable there. "What is it?"

"Umm... we're taking off," Max said as firmly as he could. After all, Liz had made the decision - he was just following orders, hehe. "You guys can grab another ride back, yeah?"

"I think so," Isabel admitted. "Wherever we end up going next." The clear implication that Isabel, too, wouldn't be content to be separated from Alex immediately after the party was something that Max tried not to dwell on too much. "Have a great time, guys."

"Thanks," Liz told her. "Okay, I have to say goodbye to Maria - and Ava - and then I'll meet you out front. You go thank Mister Valenti and Maria's mom for us." And she kissed him wetly for just a few seconds, hurried off, and Max shook his head and went off to do what he had to do.

"I have to admit," he said, as they got back into the car, "that I never expected we'd have our first time... in the cheesiest, cheapest motel in the Roswell city limits."

"Actually, the Roadside is worse," Liz mentioned absently. "But tumbleweed was within my price range, and... well, my parents will be home tonight. So are yours. And - and I wanted to do this, before we left home. I don't know if it makes sense to you, that I'd decide so suddenly, but..."

"About as much sense as anything that came from the mysteries of the feminine mind," Max joked. "I guess something like this has never been that far from your mind ever since... since future me? I have to admit I've been wondering ever since you told me much about that part." That was one of the strangest things that had ever happened in Max's relatively strange and alien-infested life; for all that it hadn't happened directly to him. Last fall, apparently, Liz had met into a time-travelling incarnation of himself, someone who had travelled back from fourteen years in the future, from a time when he and Liz had been married, had been happy - until alien disaster had ruined everything, and they two of them, older Max and older Liz, had decided that the only way to 'fix' things was to split their younger selves up and encourage Max closer to Tess. That whole thing didn't make sense, except possibly in the 'they were desperate and wrong' category, which served as a sort of warning about committing to a strategy based on jumping to conclusions. Tess was nobody's saviour.

That thought suddenly gave Max a nasty enough turn that the car swerved slightly. Were they jumping to a similar conclusion by running away from home? No, he didn't think so, although it was hard to tell. There was a difference between committing to an uncertain conclusion and taking action based on insufficient information. Sometimes information simply was insufficient and action of some sort needed to be taken, and then, Max thought, you had to weigh the options, play it safe a little bit in the sense of taking the course of action that seemed to minimize the worst-case scenarios, and be open to new information coming in and other people's opinions that you trusted. Now, he was doing that. They'd gone over the alternatives - fighting, hiding undercover in Roswell, escaping by space, or escaping on land. Hiding the Granilith underground and escaping by land seemed like it would minimize the most notably bad possibilities, and he was staying open to other possibilities, as much as he could. They'd committed to hiding the Granilith away, but that was only because it was the best way of keeping away from the bad outcome of Kivar gaining control over it anytime soon.

Future Max, on the other hand... well, Max couldn't judge how much his time-traveller alter ego (and his wife,) might have weighed their options, or with how much care, but what Liz had said about their lives being rocked by tragedy around the same time as they'd made the choice to go ahead with this desperate strategy didn't say too much for the calmness of their state of mind. They might have been dealing with high stakes - with the lives of friends, but Max thought that tearing himself away from Liz had been a sacrifice of greater cost than he'd want to make. And no matter how much Liz had tried to argue with Future Max that there had to be another way, he hadn't listened. He hadn't been open to her opinion, though she trusted him and he should have trusted her.

"You're really quiet," Liz pointed out. "Thinking about Future you again?"

"Yeah, and about all the ways the lessons we can learn from his mistakes might apply to what's going on now," Max admitted. "But I think we're on about as solid a ground as we could be... Damn, shit!" So engrossed had Max been in his thoughts, he'd completely forgotten where they were heading, and just now realized that they'd missed the turn for the Tumbleweed parking lot, and were now sailing past the edge of the inn's property. Liz gently hushed him down and directed him through a circuit around a block of side streets, until they got back. Checking in at the front desk was, well, it was about as humiliating as possible... two obviously young people in formal regalia checking in for a room together, and all that. The guy behind the desk was discrete by habit - probably this sort of thing was old saw to him by now, except that he betrayed a bit of surprise that probably had to do with his ignorance of any school dance or other large organized formal event in town that night. And then they had the magnetic key cards, and found the room. Liz sat on the corner of the bed and looked at Max, a little bit nervous about the whole situation. Max pulled up a chair to sit straight across from her, taking her hand and hoping that what he had to ask her next wouldn't just add to the tension.

"I... I have something to ask you, my dearest darling," Max said softly. "It... it may sound weird, but this is about Future Max. I... I feel a little disconnected from all of this stuff about him, because the only thing I know about him is what you've said. Not that I don't trust you, but it's kind of a narrow channel of information. I can't picture what he looked like, or what his voice sounded like, or..."

"Well, that was on purpose," Liz pointed out. "He... he took great pains that I was the only one ever to see him. Especially great pains with you - because of that whole weird the 'two of you would explode' thing." Liz sighed. "So I don't know how I can..." She swallowed hard. "You... you want me to try to send you a memory of him? Pictures, audio, the whole thing?"

"Well, whatever you can get across," Max mumbled. From the very start, their connection had had the potential for direct exchange of mental imagery and other senses like that... Max had gotten pictures from Liz's mind when he'd connected to her, to save her life from a bullet wound, and the next night he'd reversed the process, showing Liz some of his feelings and impressions of her, which had indirectly led to Liz saving him from exposure by Mister Valenti, long before he'd come around and become sympathetic to the alien kids living in town. Later on they'd been able to give each other 'flashes' through physical contact more easily and with less concerted effort on Max's part... but those had been few and far between since Future Max's visit. "You... you've been trying to wall that stuff off from me so long that it's hard to let me in, even now that you've told me about what happened in words, isn't it?" he realized.

"Yeah, yeah I guess so," Liz admitted. "For... for months I was afraid that you'd brush my hand and suddenly know, that you'd know what happened, and what I did, and then maybe all of it would have been for nothing - back when I still thought that what we did did count for something." Liz sighed. "That... that you'd be even more upset with me for trying to deceive you than you were hurt by the idea that I might have found comfort in the arms of another guy."

"Well, put that last part out of your head, right now," Max insisted loudly. "I... what you did was one of the noblest things that I have ever heard of. I... I know how much you always loved me, Liz. Even when things were at their worst between us, I never had any doubt about that." Liz made a gesture, and Max toned his volume down. "Even when I couldn't understand why you were staying away, through my confusion I was confident in your love, darling. But... but now I know that you loved me enough to let me go, when you really believed it was better for me. You might not have been right, but I am still so grateful for the sacrifice." He reached out and touched the smile that was forming on Liz's slightly pale face.

"And... and I guess that I've been keeping that deep-down and vulnerable part of me shielded from you in general, ever since Tess left," Liz admitted. "Because... well, how things went last year hurt me, and I don't want my heart to get hurt again." She sighed. "But... but we're here, in a way, because I want to make myself vulnerable to you in a way that's at least as important - because I want to be with you, to show how much I love you, and that does open me up to getting hurt too." Liz took a deep breath, and then let it out and a relatively calm, serene countenance filled her entire body. She opened her mouth to say something, but Max rubbed her thumb with his own without being directly conscious of the gesture, and suddenly there were no need for words.

He was seeing something completely different... a dim and uncertain view out through Venetian blinds, across a busy street, and to a bunch of tables and chairs that had been set outside the front door of the Crashdown - seeing himself and Tess, talking in a relatively friendly fashion and discussing a book that was sitting on the table between them. Tess was wearing a black top with a plunging neckline that showed off her perky, shapely breasts to best advantage, and the viewpoint suddenly shifted from the two young people to the building interior, on the other side of the blinds. Max could catch enough peripheral hints to confirm that he was looking out of Liz's eyes, and saw - saw his own face again, but different this time. Shaped by many years that Max could still hardly imagine, saddened by sudden and recent tragedy. His dark hair was long, grown out at the back well past shoulder length and incredibly full with a hint of curl to it, a few long locks hanging down around the sides of his face, with rough stubble covering the cheeks, chin, and upper lip, and wearing some kind of tough leather jacket. "We... we eloped," he said. "We were nineteen."

"Nineteen!" Liz's voice, from so long ago, was an incredible mix of surprise, disapproval, and wistfulness. "Wow, that is so young. That is too young."

Future Max's face quirked in amusement. "That's what I said," he insisted, "but you said that Romeo and Juliet were even younger than us, so we drove to Vegas." Max felt incredibly strange seeing this, and realizing that this Max had actually lived through what he was telling her about. He actually felt more than a little jealous of himself. They hadn't had to live through the kind of angst that they'd wished on him and his Liz, had they? They couldn't realize what it was like - how valuable what they were sacrificing really was. "Got married at the Elvis chapel," Future Max continued. "Congratulations, kids." That last phrase was somehow done in so perfect an impersonation of a really bad Elvis Presley impersonator that Max felt like laughing in the middle of the flash - and then he heard a soft chuckle from Liz, in the memory.

"So we didn't have a real wedding?" Liz asked, almost as if she were a television interviewer, prompting the subject for Max's own viewing benefit, while staying carefully 'off screen the entire time. (Of course, in this medium, Liz couldn't really have come onscreen unless she looked into a mirror.)

"Oh, we had a great wedding," Future Max insisted, smiling at the memory. "You called Maria, Michael, Isabel, and Alex, and had them meet us halfway. We spent the whole night singing and dancing in some dive outside Phoenix, and at the end of the night, 'I Shall Believe' came on the radio." Max wondered at that, as Liz must have worried about the reference to Alex many times since they got the news that he was dead. (Fortunately, the news wasn't quite correct, of course.) Presumably, without Tess in their lives, Alex had never had to go through that ordeal in the first place - yet another way that Future Max's timeline seemed to be preferable.

"I love that song," Liz told the stranger with his own face.

Future Max's eyes twinkled. "I know." And all of a sudden, the scene shifted away from the congressional office, which was where that first scene had had to be... Max had charged across the street a little bit later, alerted by a chance word from Tess that Liz had been involved in setting the two of them up there, and had argued with her in the office. He hadn't realized that Future Max had been there - his future self must have slipped away into another room to avoid him.

But now, Liz and Future Max were in Liz's bedroom, and as it happened were indeed standing next to the wide mirror that served as the door to Liz's closet and a dressing mirror at the same time, so that he could see the two of them in the reflection as if he were a ghostly observer, not looking out of Liz's eyes. "So we went to the concert," Liz was saying.

"No," Future Max replied through gritted teeth. "The night of Gomez I came to your room. That's the night that things between us were, umm, were cemented." He seemed embarrassed about that last word.

Liz's eyes widened slightly in surprise and confusion. "Cemented. So when you say cemented, you..."

"We made love."

"No, no, we...we didn't!" Liz's insistence about something that Future Max had lived through and that was still in her future, (and a future she might never reach,) was almost comical. Future Max tried to calm her down, repeating her name, but Liz kept talking over him. "No, I have no intention of making love to you or...or anyone else at this particular stage of my life."

Future Max was calmly certain. "I beg to differ."

"No. Making love to you is the farthest thing from my mind." Liz insisted uselessly. "I...I don't even have protection!" As if that was the clincher.

"I did," he admitted.

"Oh, that's great," Liz declared sarcastically. "There you are, Max the Saint, just walking around with a condom in his back pocket. I...I...I don't even care what happened in your reality. I am not making love to you or anyone until I am ready, and I am just not ready."

Once again, the scene blipped out, like a short movie on a videotape that had suddenly been stopped, and Max considered. Obviously Liz had reacted more negatively to the idea than... than he would have if he'd been in the same situation. He had never expected to make love to Liz when he went to her room that night, but he would have said he could see it happening if asked, mostly because his heart and his guy parts had been so twisted up with unfulfilled desire and longing that he'd been very aware of being close to a snapping point. He had been keeping a condom in his wallet, (in his front pocket actually,) and if Liz had simply admitted how much she loved and missed him, his own raging passion, unbound by those simple words, could have washed them both away. He oddly wondered if Liz had been glad of what they'd done when she woke up in the morning, or if she'd regretted things. Somehow Max didn't think that either of them would regret it this time around... and maybe that was worth some of the heartache that they'd had getting here.

One more psychic movie played out in Max's mind, (was all of this happening in just an instant of time? He was hardly aware of his own body, or of any time except as measured by his own thoughts.) To his surprise - this time the face was clearly Liz's - her hair shorter and in a kind of straight bob that was different than anything he'd ever imagined Liz doing, her face more mature and somehow even lovelier than he knew was possible. Max realized that somehow he must be looking through Future Max's eyes. Had he left Liz with some kind of psychic memory that she was now passing on to him? Was she aware of this?

What Future Liz said was short and very to the point. "Max, if you don't do this, we're gonna die. Everyone will. Max, you have to do this. You have to try it." What struck Max, more than just the words or the urgency, was the complete trust and intimacy that lay behind them. He could tell that Future Max and Future Liz had indeed lived many happy years together and had become very comfortable with each other, with each other's fears and worries. He wondered offhand if they'd had any children and what had happened to them in the invasion? And then the flash sequence faded away, and he was back in the motel room with Liz, she looking deeply and searchingly into his face, as if she was wondering what he'd seen.

Max's first impulse was to debrief her in considerable detail - or at least enough to make it clear to her, since the two longer sequences were memories that she was probably already familiar with once he gave her enough cues - the third she might or might not have seen already. But it then occurred to Max, that talking about anything like that could wait. Seeing all of this about Future Max and what he and Liz had had together in their other timeline - the first night of love, the impromptu Vegas wedding, and the good years together, had made Max realize how much he wanted something very similar himself. And there was... was no real reason that they couldn't, well, not except for the element of alien danger, which was going to be a factor in their lives no matter what, it seemed. All of the confusion and angst of the Tess saga had faded away, and Liz had brought him here tonight because she wanted to cement their relationship before leaving Roswell on an unknown odyssey. He thought that she was nervous enough with having instigated this entire motel business, and wanted him to make the next move.

That was something Max felt capable of doing, definitely.

He moved over to the bed next to her in one smooth movement, leaning in to kiss Liz and studying her face just to make sure that he wasn't jumping the gun. But her eyes, and her smile, were all screaming eagerness, and their mouths fit together like long-lost pieces of a single broken treasure. Max wanted all of this to be perfect for Liz, so he tried hard not to let his own eagerness push the pace too hard. They kept on kissing and kissing, and Max let his hands run over the bare skin of Liz's arms and shoulders, trying to warm her as much as he could this way, while Liz's own left arm wrapped itself around Max's back, supporting herself by that grip, while her other fingers played teasingly around Max's knee and his calf through the dark blue tuxedo pants.

Soon, though, teenage hormones would no longer be denied, and the two of them were lying side by side on the bed, Liz's wordless murmurs seeming to urge Max to pick up the pace. Daringly, he let one hand slip down to her chest and cup a tender, sweet orb through the material of her gown. "Liz," Max muttered, speaking almost directly into her ear, and then kissing her delicate earlobe for good measure, (despite the fact that there was an earring there that complicated the move slightly, "do you want me to take your dress off now?"

Liz smiled wickedly at Max for a moment before kissing him on the lips. "Yes," she moaned around the muffling effect of his mouth, "but don't stop kissing me."

Right - for any other guy, that might have been a problem, even a contradiction. For Max, it wasn't even hard anymore. As Max clinched with the incredible girl lying next to him, he concentrated on her gown, allowing his alien powers to become familiar with it, and then visualized exactly what he wanted. (Actually, this was a little hard, tougher than he had expected, but mostly just because trying to keep up this level of concentration during their making out was something that he had not really tried before. If it weren't for the prurient sensations that kissing Liz, and the way she was rubbing his thigh, produced - it would have been a snap. But he got it done anyway.)

The blue material of the dress fuzzed, then appeared to puff into fog, as all of the molecules that made it up broke up and followed individual courses for the air for a moment. The dress reappeared hanging up in a closet - that was important, because if Max hadn't made the dress solid again quickly, he would have forgotten which molecules made it up, and it was a dress that he thought Liz would probably want to wear again, especially since it was the only kind of clothing she brought to the inn. Liz smiled in appreciation of his special talents. "Maybe you should do yourself too," she breathed, panting.

"Why... why don't you try," Max said, hardly believing that he was saying it. "Ava says that you should probably develop powers any time now. Maybe all it takes is trying."

"Point," she said. "But you guys had some accidents first learning to control your powers, right?" Max had to nod agreement that this was true. "So I'm not going to experiment with a rental tux, and especially not with something like... um, short-range teleportation? Is that what you did to the dress?"

"Erm, it's a little hard to find the right term," Max admitted. "Call it molecular disintegration and re-integration?"

"Alright." Liz shrugged, which was a little distracting in her skimpy black underwear. Liz's figure would never be described as 'sinfully curvy' or 'voluptuous', to take two expressions for the sake of example, but her slender body with soft hints of womanliness at just the right spots was dominating Max's attention. "So, to return to the point - get rid of those clothes one way or another, boy, or I'm-a gonna rip 'em off you!"

"No you're not," Max said with a wink. "If you were capable of ripping them, you'd have tried the disintegration. That's probably less likely to damage them and cost me the deposit than the other."

Liz rolled her eyes. "Are you going to argue with me over fiddling little details, or..." But Max had already caught the point, and was using the same molecular disintegration trick on his own clothes - on all of his clothes. Tuxedo jacket, tuxedo pants, dress shirt, undershirt, and underpants all vanished in slightly separate streams of aerosolized molecules, and reformed scattered over the floor and coffee table towards the other end of the room. Max was left sitting on the bed, naked as the day he... crawled out of a creepy-ass alien pod in the desert mountains. Liz raised an eyebrow at him. Max shrugged. "Figured I'd save a bit of time and do it all at once.

Liz's eyes grew wide. "Alright, then I'd better use the time you saved." She bent down and immediately put her lips to his chest. Max tried not to yell in delight and anticipation so much that anyone in the next rooms would be able to hear them.

#

Max woke up from a light doze to find Liz drowsily watching him. It had been a long and not particularly restful night. They had 'cemented their relationship' twice, as well as doing a number of other intimate bedroom-type couple activities that immediately sprang to mind, (like the one that they'd already done down in Corpus Christi,) and enjoyed a whole lot of foreplay, after-play, and possibly even some interplay. Max grinned a grin so big that he was a little bit worried his mouth wouldn't be able to take it without a jawbone cracking or something silly like that. "Hello, my love, my soul," he breathed. They had also enjoyed a number of unusual 'alien effects' during their love-play, somewhat like the flash stuff but more intensive, and Max felt that things had indeed fundamentally changed in their relationship. They weren't one person in two bodies or anything cheesy like that, but certainly closer than anything they had ever been before. It had not been anything like that between him and Tess, possibly because Tess had realized that she still needed to keep her clandestine activities secret from him and had been able to stop her mind or heart from opening up to him even in the act of love - possibly because Max had caught a subconscious hint of what Tess was really like and had pulled back himself. But that was enough of thinking about T-E-S-S at a time like this.

"Do... do you want to know what I saw, right before?" he asked Liz idly.

"Oh, yeah, sure," Liz agreed with a smile, turning around and arranging herself on the bed so as to prop her head against the side of his torso, using him as a pillow. Max smiled and put his arm down across her collar as a tender gesture. Liz was just as naked as Max was now, and neither of them felt particular self-conscious after everything that had happened, so Max had a good, if somewhat unusually angled, at Liz's nude beauty from the position that she was in, since she couldn't keep the sheets over her. "I... I assumed that you saw something about F-M telling me how they cemented."

"Yeah, and you didn't believe it, said that you weren't ready for being with anyone right then," Max said, and Liz blushed fiercely, which gave her chest an intriguingly pinker tone too. "Also, well, first actually was him telling you about getting married in Vegas." Liz nodded. "By the way, I wondered if future Liz - I mean, Liz from that alternate timeline, if she regretted that she and Max had slept together. I mean, obviously, if you were surprised by future Max telling you a few days beforehand, you probably wouldn't have been expecting it any more when it happened the, umm, the first time through."

Liz smiled. "Yeah, but... well, I guess you didn't hear this part in your flash. He also said that nothing ever came between them... between us - after that night: that we were inseparable up until the end. That certainly doesn't sound like I had a case of morning after regret." She sighed. "And... I guess I can see why not, at this point. It's like... this changes everything, but I don't see how I could possibly be upset about it or resent it, as long as I love you. And I was definitely still very much in love with you that week, as you yourself pointed out a little while ago. I might not have thought that I was ready then... maybe I wasn't, at least to the point that it was better to wait than not to. But that's not the same as regretting it after it happens."

"Absolutely inarguable," Max said. "By the way, there was a third part of the flash, which surprised me, because it wasn't about you... I mean, not really you. I think it was Future Max and Future Liz, from before he came back in time."

"Wow, really?" Liz actually sat up, turning herself around to stare more directly at him. "But... but how - well, I guess it's kinduv begging the question to say that something's impossible - when it comes to alien powers. We don't know nearly enough to say for sure. This whole thing doesn't really seem to fit any patterns we know about though."

"I... I was wondering if you got a flash from him of her, then maybe I could have inherited that flash from you," Max said. "But then, you probably wouldn't be quite so surprised at the idea."

"No, I never got anything from him - well, a dim sense, a kind of echo of our own connection," Liz quickly amended. "Enough that, well, enough that it reassured me he really was who he claimed to be. But it was like the connection between you and I was a phone line, but with him it was a bad connection, lots of static and random noise. Maybe that's because of the time differential between us, either in terms of our own ages or absolute universal time. That kept me from getting anything more specific from him."

"Alright," Max sighed. "Well, maybe he was able to give you an impression that you got on a subconscious basis, and then I got it from you, or maybe it came another way. I'm not sure," Max sighed and repeated that one sentence that Future Liz had said in the flash. "This... this may sound weird, but what if Max and Liz were... were being influenced by alien powers in the future, distorting their judgement? Someone knew that they had the ability to go back in time and change things, and wanted them to change it in a particular way that would work well for them."

"What, like a low-intensity mind-warp, the type that Tess used on you later that year?" Liz asked. "I... I guess that would fit, actually. Suppose we'll probably never know for sure now. I hope that if they did, that whatever they were trying didn't work out the way that they expected."

"Somehow, I don't think anybody could have planned out what's happened in Roswell recently," Max said, sitting up and gently pinching her leg. They leaned together to kiss again, and suddenly someone pounded on the door.

"Lizzie, I know that you're in there," a familiar voice called out, "with him. I give you one minute to make yourselves decent and open the door or I... alright, I admit, I don't know what I'll do, but the smart bet is that it'll really be ugly."

The voice was Jeff Parker - Liz's father. Max groaned. Of course something like this had to interrupt their perfect night together.

Liz sighed, got up and went to the room closet - hesitated, and got out two tumbleweed inn dressing gowns, instead of touching her prom dress. Once they had both shrugged into them, Max followed Liz over to the door and she opened it, showing a very angry Mister Parker, who was wearing shoes that didn't match, pants that looked rather like pyjamas, and a heavy black sweater. There was a moment of silence as his eyes went back and forth between them, a stunned expression on his face. Then Jeff immediately threw a punch at Max's face - startled in turn, Max tried to move back and roll with the impact, but when the fist actually connected, he wasn't at all sure if it had worked. He tumbled very unceremoniously to the floor, and only managed to keep the dressing gown from showing something that he was sure Liz's dad didn't want to see and Max didn't want to show.

"Come on, Lizzie, we're leaving," Mister Parker insisted.

"Oh, my god, no Dad," Liz insisted. Max looked up and saw that she had stepped a pace and a half back from the door, and was rubbing her left arm as if she'd had to pull it free from her father's grip, (though probably she hadn't had to try really hard.) "For... for starters, why the hell are you calling me 'Lizzie'? I'm... I'm nearly a grown woman, and my name is just Liz. And nobody gets to tell me where I'm going or what I'm doing any more." She faced her father down intently, but with a trace of anxiety. "It was my idea to come here, and for what - I convinced Max, so sucker-hitting him like that is tremendously uncalled for! I'm... I'm sorry if you and Mom are a little taken off guard by this, and I really didn't want either of you to find out like this, but there it is." She sighed. "How... how did you even find out that I was... that we were here?"

Jeff Parker smiled a slightly bent smile. "I... I've prepared for this day. There's - there's a picture of you behind the check-in desk with a note to call me if you show up with a guy."

"Wait... wait a second," Max muttered. "If... if the guy called you when we checked in-"

"No, he didn't." Jeff shrugged. "Kids today. Apparently he just thought it was funny - told a bunch of his friends here working at the hotel, including the next guy to take over at the check-in desk once his shift was over. The replacement took things a bit more seriously - he was the one who called me, about fifteen minutes ago."

"Oh my god, Dad," Liz breathed. "You're totally unbalanced right now. You - you should probably just go, Dad. Go home. I'll be back... um, sometime fairly soon." She sighed. "You've pretty successfully ruined the mood, at least. Can - can you just go now?"

She held her breath and waited for Dad's reply.