Thanks for coming back to read!! Thanks a ton for the reviews and welcome to all the new readers! I might be a slow writer, but the story is coming :)

XXXII
About Before
cont.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

As Dave was navigating through the complicated winds of Hurricane DeLuca, Jake too was dealing with his own storm. Many things were competing for Jake's attention as he gave Max the bottle of water. Questions swarmed in his mind like bees around a hive. How did their bond work? What had happened to Max to fall asleep like that? What on Earth had that energy… shield-thing been? What had startled him so deeply that he had exploded the entire screen?

What did Max think was so important that he needed the screen off?

Jake hadn't missed Max's question to Liz as to what she was doing there, or that startled look, or the sudden realization just a second before Max had turned and exploded the screen. Realization of what, though, was one more of those bees swarming his mind. The thing Jake knew, without a doubt, was that Max was wired up really bad, and that Jake needed to make sure he would calm down. Something had scared Max far more than anything Jake had seen so far, and he had the distinct notion that it had a lot to do with Liz being there.

Theories spun through his mind, finally settling on the most possible one: There was something Max didn't want Liz to see. But what? Or was Jake even right? As usual with these kids, he was left wondering a million things with no real answers. Still, the one thing he had deduced from the screen exploding was that Max needed to be out of that room, and so Jake had complied. Yet Jake couldn't risk letting Max go in that state of mind. He needed the kid to know he wasn't angry with him, or even scared. Though quite frankly, Jake was a little afraid. For the first time, he was really uncertain of how Max would react now that Liz was in the room.

Incredible how having Liz around changed things so much.

Pushing those thoughts aside, the one thing that would regain some trust here was if Jake gave them something they needed most: Information. But that was tricky at best, being that he himself only had half-truths and a million conjectures of his own. Not to mention a past to evade, fears to conceal and doubts better left in the dark of his room.

As he sat down, he took a moment to collect his thoughts. Max and Liz had looked ready to bolt two seconds before, but were now sitting, expectantly, eager, watching him intently. Jake himself felt as if he were on a caffeine override, his body always getting jumpy after a good cup of coffee. He diverted his eyes to the table in the middle of the three couches that made his small living room. Seven months was a long time to go through, especially when his mind had retained a very large quantity of details that would be useless right at this moment.

Arranging his priorities, he decided that the last thing he wanted was for Dave to come out in a bad light. It would do nothing to appease the kids' fears, and for all Jake had gathered, nothing was being done against them. Besides, for all their 32 years of friendship, Jake just could not doubt Dave. If Dave had wanted to do something questionable, he would have never asked Jake to come on board to begin with.

Expectant eyes met his own again, a little bit fearful, a little bit on edge, but oh so eager for the truth. The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple, he thought to himself. He cleared his throat, finally deciding that the best point to begin a story was, in fact, the beginning.

"Seven months ago Dave called me while I was doing a research project on perception in England. He wanted me to help him on a project of his own. He was tracking down three teenage kids and their friends. Three kids with highly developed psychic abilities that had attracted the US government's interest."

"He didn't tell you we were half-aliens?" Max asked, cautious, his voice low. He's so ready to snap, Jake thought, knowing he couldn't risk putting these kids under more pressure. As it was now, he had a shattered 2-inch glass door and a blasted screen, and both had hardly been planned by Max. If Jake wasn't careful about how he handled the next minutes, then… He honestly had no idea. He had a very vivid vision of a Michael as stressed out as Max, and suddenly, Jake got a glimpse of their energy destroying half the compound.

What are we playing with, Dave?

He shook the thought off. If what it took for them to calm down was the truth, then he was willing to compromise. At least the truth as he best understood it, anyway.

"Over the phone?" Jake answered Max's question, "No. He told me the layout. You were running for your lives, you were still pretty green about your own limits. There were things he didn't know for sure, but he wanted another pair of eyes to take a look at what he had so far. It was very clear that you needed help. I was on a plane to the States two hours later."

How far those memories seemed now to Jake. Dave had never really said that they "needed help", that was what Jake had concluded. And somewhere in that flight over the ocean he had told himself that these "gifted" kids wanted to explore their powers as well. Why wouldn't they? It had been Jake's mistake, no one else's, really, yet he still felt cheated by Dave on that account.

"We met at the airport, which was actually rare. Dave was so eager to tell me the details he couldn't wait to see me. He's always been so excited about things, always... But this time, it was more... urgent than I had ever seen before."

Max and Liz exchanged a somewhat anxious look. Had they been aware, truly, really aware of how important they were for Dave? And was this tidbit of information a good thing for them to know? Jake paused for a second so he could regroup his thoughts. He reminded himself that he had to be careful about how he was delivering this "truth".

"He had stumbled upon you by chance," he continued. "He had gotten intrigued when two completely unrelated events had crashed into one strange happening at the Phoenix Hospital Pediatrics ward: A bullet hole on a waitress' dress, and a deep space microwave signal originating in Roswell, New Mexico. Two years had passed by the time he was telling me this in the car. Aliens..." Jake trailed off, with a small smile, remembering the time, "aliens who looked like humans; teenagers lost in the threads of the government's Special Unit, and strange happenings he couldn't quite put together." Jake regarded them again. He didn't need to elaborate since Dave had already told them how he had discovered them in the first place. "He wasn't sure if he should intervene."

His voice sounded rather old, Jake thought for a second, as both Max and Liz frowned.

"Why? What was he afraid of?" Liz asked, making Jake frown in turn. It was so blatantly obvious for him.

"Risks," he said, rather sharply. Oh, how many risks Dave had been taking from the moment he had stepped in front of one of the US government "projects", to put it mildly. It was as if the mere word, "Risk", actually opened a closed door in Jake's mind: Risks, because they are still looking for us. My God, it's been more than 20 years and they are still after us. We know too much, and Dave has just kept searching and searching for more information, almost taunting them, daring them to catch him. Except that they think he's dead, and I just disappeared, and if he plays this wrong, if things backfire, then they will know the truth, and will track us down...

"Risks?" Max asked, confused, effectively pulling Jake out of his reverie, though not quite closing that door as tightly as it had been. Of course, they weren't aware of all the complicated mess his first 18 years of life had been. Hardly anyone was aware of that.

"For you, for him..." for me, Jake silently added before explaining, "Too many things had to be moved in place. From infiltrating the Special Unit, to tracking you down without a third party knowing it. He had already started it, but he was still uncertain."

"Uncertain," Max said, slightly narrowing his eyes. "But he already knew most of what he knows now, that we were fleeing for our lives. That we were no threat."

"Don't be so sure," Jake said, smiling a little. It was rather comical to see how people thought that Dave knew every single thing there was to know. Dave had an uncanny talent for making people draw their own conclusions, usually for his own benefit. But then again, it wasn't so comical when Jake himself was the one to fall for Dave's talents...

"Dave was still getting information from other sources. He didn't know how many people were following your trail. Just for starters, there was your boss who had known there was something to be found in the radio spectrum; the owners of Liz's dress, who had remained anonymous at the time. The Special Unit that had suddenly branched into the Army... You might not have been a threat per se, but you sure were dragging a lot of those on your tail."

"Brody never had... he just found some artifact that turned out to be some sort of... communicator..." Max said, as if in defense of his former boss. Though he had gotten rather tense at this. What did Max really know about Mr. Davis then?

It would be years before Jake would know that Brody's mystery artifact had been a very effective way to turn off Max's powers.

"Well, Dave researched Brody Davis extensively, that's for sure. When it became apparent he wasn't one of you, just a very avid researcher on alien things, Dave got puzzled. He was trying to understand why you had healed his daughter and the other children too. Was your relationship that close? Was he blackmailing you? What did he know for sure? Dave never really understood why, and for a while he was really fixed on that single event. I gotta tell you, it does puzzle me as well."

For all Max had talked about why he didn't want to heal again, he had never really told Jake why he had healed those kids in the first place. And that was the most interesting part about these three hybrids: Their motivations. Silence met his subtle request. Maybe some other time, Jake sighed inwardly.

"But Mr. Davis was the least of Dave's worries," Jake continued once the silence passed the comfortable mark. If he hadn't had their attention before, he surely did now.

"Meta-Chem went down in the flames, a research company sister to many other research companies of which their owners just… vanished. And suddenly, there was this research on alien genetics being sold to the highest bidder."

The temperature must have dropped some 4 degrees, Jake would have sworn, from the way goosebumps appeared on both Max's and Liz's arms.

"What research?" Liz asked, just as quietly as Max had talked before, as if they thought speaking louder would scare Jake away along with the information they were gaining.

"It took him some time to trace it back," Jake sincerely said. One thing he had to make sure was that Max and Liz understood that things weren't easy -not even for Dave- out in the real world. Dave couldn't snap his fingers or disregard a thousand little threats around him just because he wanted to know something. Things had to be done carefully, and most of the time, slowly, for it to work out with no one being the wiser. "He traced it back to Meta-Chem and its researchers. The information came from what they had learned from months of studying Michael while he was at work."

Max and Liz exchanged another significant look. Significant, sure, but Jake was damned if he could understand what was being said between those two. They had already known Meta-Chem was onto them, that part of the story was clear to Jake. Michael's friend had been killed in order for Michael to heal him, and later Max had been threatened to heal Clayton Wheeler or face certain death.

"Have you ever wondered," Jake said, taking a slight detour from his original path, "what Meta-Chem would have done if you hadn't…" died? "collapsed?" Jake chose at the last second. Max looked at him with that expression of slow realization, his eyes opening a bit too round, and his lips parting just slightly.

"They would have taken Max, wouldn't they?" Liz asked, her expression mirroring her husband's.

"Most likely. They already knew so much about you…" Jake trailed off, now his thoughts returning to Dave… and himself, making his internal dialogue go silently in his head. People like us, Max, we don't get to have an uneventful life… there's always someone who knows too much, and is powerful enough to take us away. Sometimes I think we can't hide forever, but that certainly doesn't stop us from trying.

"You already know so much about us too," Max said, regaining his precious control, his voice low. It wasn't an accusation, more like a statement that lead to the question of what are you going to do with it now?

Jake smiled faintly. "That's in large part thanks to their research. Dave bought it as soon as he knew it was on the market, but his uneasiness grew. How many people had clues that would lead to you and by extension, to him? He hadn't known they had been the owners of Liz's dress to begin with, that was a surprise reserved for this week."

One of many surprises, indeed.

"They're a nightmare," Ray had said in their meeting yesterday to discuss the kids' events the past two days. "They started with the local Sheriff and ended with the freaking Army on their heels. They've gone from human hunters, to alien hunters, to alien doubles, to traitors, to pointless trips and good Lord, it's as if they had a death wish or something…"

To say that the kids' actions over the past four years had given Ray a migraine would be an understatement. Ray was an expert on disappearing and evading pursuers, so for him to finally know all those little things that hadn't made sense, to know all the details that until this week had been in shadows, had been a real revelation. Dave hadn't been too happy either. They have been careless, was all he had said as he had continued with his puzzle, half of it done by now.

They are just kids, Jake thought not for the first time since he had seen them arrive a week and a half ago, oblivious as to how their lives were about to change.

He stood up, starting to pace, the only way he was going to burn off all the excess energy he had in his body right now. He had always paced to clear his thoughts, and to give his body something to do while his mind was occupied with other matters. Sighing out loud, he was aware that he was taking way too long to get where the kids wanted him to get.

"By this point, a month had already passed since you had escaped your graduation ceremony. Ray could barely keep tabs on you, and Dave was still tying loose ends. And one of those was how to get you to agree."

A memory flashed into Jake's mind, making him stand still for a few seconds.

"So, the serum stops their powers… just like that?" Dave had asked him as they both had been going through the Special Unit's Head Medical Technician's notes.

"It's hard to say…" Jake had answered as he reviewed the file for the fourth time. "They literally stumbled upon it in '47 when they were trying to control the survivor. But around that time doctors where starting to understand the basics of neurotransmitters, so they targeted what they knew. The serum seemed to attack several chemicals in some degree. A neurotransmitter called serotonin, especially, which we now believe is a highly effective regulator of anger, aggression, body temperature, and sleep, for example. Being that their emotions trigger outbursts of energy, it might be a way of shutting those paths down."

Dave had nodded his understanding, his eyes reading some paper in front of him. Where Dave was so gifted on his codes, Jake was with biology, but hardly did they ever discuss their mutual fields, mainly because they were hardly working on the same project.

"The Special Unit actually understood that what they needed to target were actually neuromodulators," Jake had continued, and then he had backtracked a bit as Dave had turned to look at him, a bit puzzled. "They can be considered neurotransmitters by some, which is exactly what this serotonin is. The thing that I cannot understand is why the serum also attacks acetylcholine… It's supposed to disrupt the somatic nervous system, you know, voluntary control of body movement…"

"I know what that is," Dave had smiled as he had returned his eyes to the paper in front of him. Sometimes, they both forgot that, despite the fact they were talking about very different things, it didn't mean the other didn't have a pretty thorough understanding of each other's fields.

"The fact is," Jake had said, finally getting to the point of his troubled thoughts, "it doesn't suppress their body movements or the reception of external stimuli… not hearing, not touch and certainly not sight. I don't know what that is attacking. It shouldn't even be part of the serum."

Dave had stopped reading and looked at him, frowning. Then his eyes had fallen to a low point behind Jake's right, clearly thinking something. "But it does disrupt their touch on their… psychic abilities. They can no longer move objects with their abilities… you know, they cannot move with their minds."

Give Dave a bunch of facts, a beginning and ending, and he would put cause and effect together in 30 seconds or less. If only biology were that easy. "I've thought about that… but I've barely begun trying to decipher these things properly. The serum works, okay, but we are not really sure why, or how. They seem to work with the same chemical blocks we have, but in ways we can't even imagine."

Back in the here and now, Jake resumed his pacing. He was certainly learning a lot about how those chemical blocks were manifesting themselves in the form of shattered glasses, sudden green shields, and a destroyed screen. If only he had known what he was truly getting himself into… Oh, who was he kidding? He would have jumped aboard just as fast, but with other expectations.

"He did a lot of thinking before coming to me," Jake finally said to them, still lost in thought, "he played a lot of scenarios in his head, trying to figure how best to approach you. By the time we met, he still wasn't sure."

"So you helped him," Max's voice broke into Jake's thoughts loud and clear, even if Max himself was –as usual- talking very low. Jake met his eyes. There wasn't reproach in Max's eyes, but a certain veil of mistrust was now present in his stance. Jake knew –or at least hoped- that Max wanted to trust him, but didn't know how, and these… revelations weren't exactly working in Jake's favor.

"Yes," Jake answered truthfully, going ahead with the whole story. "It took us several days, but Ray, Dave, and I were able to meet all Dave's parameters. It started with one simple fact, as all his deals do: How could he prove his deal was solid?"

"He needed to build trust," Liz said, frowning. "How did that end with those rooms?"

How indeed. It was a rather long story and Jake took a second to sort out the reasons behind their actions. He asked himself for a second if he was going to come to a point where he would have to admit that he honestly didn't know what Dave had been thinking... and he didn't like it when he answered himself with you can bet on it.

"We started with the facts," Jake began again, chronologically arranging the events that had ultimately led them to the rooms. "You had been running for the past six months, somehow avoiding detection. Besides the former Sheriff, you had had no trustworthy adults around to help you. The FBI first, and the Army later, were after you with the firm intention of either wiping you out or locking you in a dark room without ever intending to believe your side of the story. Your families were left behind, barely aware of why you had to run away, and completely unable to help you at all. For all intents and purposes, you were alone in this world, and had no reason to believe anyone would willingly lend you a hand."

There was a subtle but certainly wounded look in the kids' eyes, and Jake knew he had stirred a lot of painful memories there. Truth was often so cold, he reflected.

"Trust," Jake continued, "was not the first thing in our list. You had had way too many reasons not to trust even your shadow, that we couldn't start there. It was part of the list, of course, but our first major concern was to strip away the illusion that it was safe, that you could defend yourselves. That no matter how many powers you had, or how prepared you thought you were, you were still… vulnerable." Telling them this, so calm and rather so emotionless, was also making Jake re-think all his own motives, his own expectations… his own future in this scheme.

"We didn't have a chance," Max said after a few seconds have gone by, his eyes lost in some point in front of him, his bottle of water forgotten in his hand. "You didn't even let us try to defend ourselves." Max's eyes met Jake's, understanding filling them. "You didn't want us thinking if we had done something different… if we had just seen it coming… We just didn't know what was happening until it was too late… way beyond too late."

"Unaware. And all together." Those had been exactly Dave's words, his parameters. All their plans had revolved around those not so simple things, and the result was sitting right in front of Jake. It had worked, but for how long? "You went to sleep one day, and the next you woke up in prison. No warnings, no chance… Nothing."

Silence descended again as Jake got slightly stuck for a second, finally taking seat on a coach's arm. How best to continue? Ray had already told them how the plan to capture them had gone, so there was no real point to go over it again. "You were put to sleep and brought here on early Wednesday morning, by helicopter. It was my duty to make sure you were okay. There's where the blood tests enter the picture," Jake emphasized as he looked directly at Liz. Max frowned, knowing he had missed something between the two of them, and turned to look at Liz, silently asking what this was about. She was caught between her desire to tell him, and her need to listen to Jake. She turned to look at Jake, unsure of what to do.

"You had been captured," Jake proceeded, not wanting to get into another argument with Liz about what had really happened. He was getting there, anyway. "So, as I said, the next thing for us to do was to make certain you were all right. We ensured all your vitals were stable. EKG's and EEG's standard measures were taken. We kept a close eye on you for the next three days, and of course, we did the blood tests all along." Jake acknowledged Liz. "We needed to know how your health was doing; a frame of reference on where you stood."

"That took you three days?" Liz said, clearly unconvinced still about Jake's claims. Her voice had returned to the same tone she had been using before Max had woken up. Patience, Jake. They're just scared kids.

"We were supposed to take a week," Jake corrected after a few seconds had passed. "You see, the more time you lost, the more intimidating it became. And Dave wanted to scare you as much as he could because that fear was real. Just like everyone else out there hunting you is real… But things changed once you were here…"

Jake trailed off. He wanted to tell them the honest truth as things had happened, but there was really nothing to gain by telling Max that his heart hadn't seemed to like being sedated for so long. It just couldn't be easy to deal with that kind of information after learning less than thirty minutes before that his heart had once literally stopped beating for almost half a minute.

Jake also wondered for a second about those other things that had happened in that white room that they hadn't discussed. One of the many Special Unit medical pages flashed into Jake's mind: They had drugged Max long enough to strip him and clothe him in the hospital scrubs, not so different from what Jake had done. In fact, a variant of the sedative gas that had been used on Max was the one that had been used in the motel kidnapping. Jake knew it was relatively safe for the hybrids' physiology, and had used enough to knock them out for a few minutes so the paramedics could do their work in peace.

It wasn't guilt that invaded Jake's heart. It was regret. Regret that they hadn't been able to come up with another scenario that would ensure the kids would understand the peril they were in. It shouldn't matter now.

Yet somehow, it did.

Liz's hand reached for Max's, maybe sensing that what Jake had been talking about, that what had changed involved her husband. Static electricity flew once again between their hands, the crisping sound audible in the silence of the room, but this time they both held onto each other.

"What happened?" Max asked, staring directly into Jake's calm eyes.

"I didn't want to keep you sedated for so long, it wasn't safe." Technically, that was the honest truth, it just so happened to lack the explanation behind it. Maybe he and Dave were more alike than either of them knew. "So Dave had no choice but to let the sedative wear off," Jake continued, neither Max or Liz thinking of asking any further. "You woke up an hour later, barely missing me giving you the serum that interferes with your abilities…"

All this seemed like so long ago, when in fact it had only been a week since all these events had happened. Time always had a funny way of being perceived, Jake knew, but as he regarded these kids in front of him, so young, so vulnerable and inexperienced, he wondered how they regarded the situation as a whole. Months had passed since they had left home, and days since they had accepted Dave's conditions, yet Jake had the distinct notion that they would feel as if a whole lifetime had already passed. Drastic changes usually felt that way.

"You helped him with the rooms, too?" Max asked, frowning a little, as if something in this puzzle didn't make sense.

"No, not really. He gave me every single medical file he could find, and I knew Ray had been in Roswell gathering data for close to two years by then. Dave spied on you first because all he knew was that signals from space were coming to the Earth, and a possible alien deserter was healing kids in Phoenix. He needed to know if you were friends or foes. Were you a real alien invasion, a threat? He had enough information by the time he started planning the rooms that only the smallest details were left to be sorted out. He wanted you to know that there's nothing in your lives that cannot be found. That you cannot hide."

"But if he knew so much about us, then he wouldn't… the interviews wouldn't make sense," Liz said, frowning, probably thinking the purpose of the personal meetings not for the first time.

Jake chuckled. "Of course he doesn't know everything. Certainly not what really matters. He knows what others think of you, but it's not quite the same," Jake said with a slight smile. "That's why he wants to talk to you, privately. To know if his information is accurate or not, and what else he has missed. He wanted to meet you alone that first night. He was very adamant about that, despite Ray's protests about his safety. He trusted that he knew you enough to know his first meeting would go… well, if not smoothly, at least not violently."

Jake's eyes strayed to Max's hands, the bottle still unopened, the water bubbling inside. How could Max boil the water without melting the plastic?

"I was nervous," Jake absently said, his eyes still in Max's hand, though the teen had yet to realize why. "It was close to midnight, and I was sitting at my desk, going through all your numbers and charts from the tests we've done, and all that time I was thinking, "What if Dave is not good enough? What if these kids choose the road because we went too far?"

Jake stood up from his place on the couch's arm and went back to the cupboard, thinking that he needed a drink, something he would indulge himself in once he was alone in that room. "Do you want anything to drink?" he said, addressing Liz, who shook her head no. "Something to eat, maybe?" This time the negative came from both of them. He took a Coke thinking he could use the caffeine to calm his nerves. He knew there was something wrong with that thought, but couldn't quite figure out what. It would be more than an hour before he realized that coffee did anything but calm his nerves. Boiling water. And the plastic is intact…

He sighed, shaking his head in an effort to clear his mind.

"Once you awoke there, you knew everything there was to know," Jake continued as he walked back to the couch's arm. "Everything had been taken away. Your safety, your friends, your sense of control. Gone. You spent hours there, worrying, wondering… pondering what to do. And then you met him, and he set you free. When you returned to talk to Dave the next day, you knew everything there was to know. He didn't lie about anything he had done."

He let his words sink in for a few seconds. No, it's wasn't fair. No, they had had no right. But fairness and rights were just as much of an illusion as safety and control were, and Jake had been cynical enough since he was 10 to know that. He had no illusions about mankind, something he envied from Dave, and that's why he never did find questionable what he had helped to do to these kids. They had never been in danger, and they were safe now.

"Now you think he has some secret agenda, and he might have for all you know, but you're certain you're safe here, under clear conditions. You expected the worst to happen, and when it didn't, his offer became acceptable. He backed up his knowledge of you with the rooms, and proved his intentions by letting you go."

"As if it were just business," Liz concluded. She was still angry, Jake knew, at how Dave had executed his plan of quite literally stripping away their world. She had every right to be, but had it really been beyond her breaking point, then they wouldn't be having this conversation now.

"Yes," Jake answered. Part of the problem with this whole trust issue, was that they didn't know Dave. His best friend was so used to not being known, he probably hadn't taken the time through those interviews to let them see him. Jake didn't know if it was going to do them any good, but he still wanted these kids to know who they were dealing with and why Dave would honor their deal.

"He's not just some random, eccentric guy who had too much time in his hands and bumped into you," Jake smiled as both Max's and Liz's curiosity spiked. "He deals with a lot of people, moves an incredible amount of information through all the world. If he doesn't keep his word, if he's careless in the slightest way, it would impact hundreds, if not thousands of lives that directly and indirectly are related to what he knows and who he tells. He's a pirate of information, but he understands the weight he can add or take away to all kinds of matters. He's not a child playing with new toys. He looks way further than most people do, beyond what is obvious, and finds ways, hidden meanings, that are just what he needs to keep things in balance in a global scale."

"We are just… one more thing for him, then?" Max asked, not quite convinced of what he had just heard.

"No," Jake firmly said. "No, don't diminish yourselves. You are so unique and have so much to offer. So much to live for if you just have the opportunity to explore your limits. Because despite the shattering and the burning, and you scaring the hell out of me, you have extraordinary gifts that shouldn't be wasted living in fear. Even if you decide to leave this instant, or if in the future we end up on bad terms, I can tell you, right now, that Dave would do this whole circus all over again, because I would do it too."

"Why?" Max whispered, somehow that veil of mistrust slightly fading.

And without hesitation, Jake truthfully answered, "Because it would mean you at least had the chance."

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Author's Note: The line "The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple" is by Oscar Wilde.