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Revelation

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Jordan returned to the hotel room balancing two cups in his hands, one hot and one cold, and a bag of food he hoped would fit Renata's strict edict of no cutesy names. He pushed the door shut with one foot, fumbling for the light switch.

"We have to leave."

Jordan found the switch and plunged the room into brilliance just as Renata spoke. He nearly dropped the cups he had been so painstakingly careful not to spill, catching them at the last possible second and setting his burden down on a small table, grateful to whoever it was what had invented plastic cup lids.

"What are you talking about, Rena? We have another gig at the Star Seeds on Wednesday, we can't leave until then." He watched her thoughtfully, noting the packed bags that were stacked at the foot of the bed. Something had to have acutely spooked her to have her so determined to walk out on a performance, especially when they needed the money so desperately.

"We need to go now," she demanded. She reached for the phone, fully intending to call Sayer's room and inform him the same as she had Jordan.

Jordan hung the phone up before she could finish dialing Sayer's room number. "What happened?"

"We just need to-"

"No, Rena. I've learned over the years that you don't do anything without a reason. Spill it. What could have possibly happened in the hour that Sayer and I were gone?" He pried the receiver from her rigid fingers and set it back down, gently pulling her to sit next to him on the side of the bed.

"I'm not sure, it's all jumbled and confused and I don't know what to think except that I don't want to be here when he comes back. And he will come back, Jordan. I told him to stay away, that I wanted nothing to do with him, but he'll be back. I know he will." God, she hated this. Helplessness and vulnerability weren't part of her personality. She wasn't like those people back where she had grown up, sitting and cowering, just waiting for the next blow to fall, to be evicted or laid off or slammed into a wall, utterly despondent.

"Who are you talking about? Who will be back?" Jordan held her hands tightly, fighting against the chills that raced down his spine in response to her fear. Maybe if he could find out what had happened, he would be able to help her see it in a different, less frightening, light.

"You were right."

Jordan smiled, Renata admitting that he was right about something was a rarity. "About what, sweetheart?"

"That coming here was a bad idea. I ought to have listened to you. I'll never learn, will I?"

"Okay, Rena, now you've got me worried. Who scared you this much? What did they do? What happened to the outspoken, bossy woman I fell in love with?"

She cut her eyes at him. "You keep using that same old line, Jordan. One of these days it won't work anymore."

"Just as long as it works this time…" His hand snaked up under her hair and massaged the tense muscles in her neck, working through the knots his fingers found.

She turned enough to look at him and still allow him to continue the impromptu massage. "He didn't do anything, not really." Renata stared into Jordan's eyes wanting very much to lose herself in their clear blue depths. His eyes were what had attracted her to him in the beginning, before she had discovered their shared backgrounds. His eyes were beautiful and they didn't hold secrets, at least they didn't hold secrets from her. The true windows to his soul. "The nightmares, Jordan. Do you still have them?"

Thrown off by her change of topics, Jordan peered at her in concern. Renata hadn't mentioned the nightmares in years although he knew she still suffered through them. Every night she would cry out in her sleep and he would pull her into his arms, waiting for the tears and trembles to cease. He couldn't remember the last time they had spoken about them, tried to dissect some meaning from them.

"Sometimes."

She nodded and pressed his hand against her cheek, she held it there for a long moment before she spoke again. "He was one of them, one of the people in the dreams, and he was here, standing right in front of me and demanding answers."

"Which one?" From what he could remember of the terrible dreams, he knew that of the two men, one was not quite as vile as the other. Unsure of the proper course of action to take, he needed to at least know how much he should start worrying.

"It was Khivar but he called himself Michael. He looked different but it was him all the same. It wasn't the other one, but it makes no difference. I didn't make the connection when I saw them at the club, it didn't hit me until I saw him here this morning." She sucked in a shaky breath. "It's strange but I think I hurt him."

"What do you mean? You didn't use your powers on him did you?"

"No, nothing like that. I mean, yes, I did, but only to throw up a shield and make him leave. But I could almost believe that he was just some lost hurt kid, not a fiend, not Khivar."

"Did it occur to you that perhaps that's all he is? Some kid who's lost and hurting in a world he'll never truly belong to? Khivar may have been monstrous, Renata, but maybe this Michael isn't. After all, we're not who we were, are we?"

~~~

Max drove up to the Crashdown, glancing over at his passenger. Michael hadn't spoken more than a handful of words since they'd gotten into the jeep and headed back. "Do you want to go in?"

"Is Maria still here?"

The need in Michael's voice reminded Max of Maria's plea: 'Bring him back?' "Most likely. She was worried after you left."

Michael still didn't move. He wanted to see her, needed to hold her in his arms and feel her love wash over him. Somehow he just didn't think the diner was an appropriate place. "Could you, uh… Tell her I'll be at her place." Without waiting for Max's consent, he opened the door and started to walk down the sidewalk toward the DeLuca house. Maria's mother would be out of town for another couple of days and the house would be a safe haven.

"Michael!" The rain slashed against Max's face, stinging his eyes, as he followed his friend out into the storm. "What about Renata?"

"Later," he called. "I'll tell you later."

Max watched as Michael kept walking, at last disappearing around the corner. "Great." He quickly found a parking space and trudged through the rising puddles to relay Michael's message.

"He's alright," he assured Maria, watching the relief pour over her face. "He's on his way to your house." He didn't think he had ever seen the diminutive blonde move so quickly.

She hastily thanked him, hugged Liz and Alex and smiled tentatively at the rest of the group before dashing out through the door, her jacket forgotten on the back of the bench.

"I guess I'll return it to her later," Liz laughed. For as long as Michael and Maria had been bantering between having a relationship and not, between openly admitting that they loved one another and denying that the other existed, she supposed she should have anticipated her best friend's reaction.

Tess and Isabel watched Max expectantly. He slid into the booth next to Liz, reclaiming his previous position, and shrugged.

"He said that he spoke to her but he'll tell us later." He was at a loss when it came to explaining how Michael had looked when he'd found him wandering the streets, he didn't understand it himself. Something she had said or something she had done had shaken Michael to his core. Max just wished he knew what it was.

~~~

Jordan left Renata in the silence of the room. She had at last fallen back to sleep, clutching his body close to hers as the trembles desisted and she was able to rest. Untangling himself from her limbs, he stopped at the foot of the bed to watch her for a moment, listening to the even deep breaths she took.

He knew that she wasn't considered to be beautiful, she was striking but her features were too unconventional to add up to patrician loveliness. Her eyes were too dark and large and she had dusky smudges beneath them regardless of how much sleep she managed to get, he often teased her about being a gypsy, asking her to read his palm. The fortunes she made up for him were never pleasant but her eyes sparkled as she told them. Her nose was slightly crooked from being broken when she was a child and never properly reset. He had asked her once how it happened but she had simply glared at him and encased her thoughts and emotions behind a wall he couldn't penetrate, no matter how hard he tried. He mouth was set in a perpetual frown, a trait that annoyed her since it constantly instigated questions of what was wrong when she was fine. A fine sprinkling of pale freckles graced her high cheekbones as well as the bridge of her nose. She was tall and too slender to elicit anything more than somewhat curious glances from passersby who wondered what was hidden beneath the baggy clothes she wore when she wasn't performing. And her hair… Jordan loved her hair. It's gentle waves fell nearly to her waist, veiling her face and his whenever she leaned over him. Thick and glossy and so dark that unless the light shone directly on it, it appeared to be black. Her eyes and her hair were the same shade of chocolate brown and he could lose himself in them.

The food lay forgotten on the table and he reached for the coffee, holding it momentarily in his hand before the liquid was again piping hot. Ducking out the door, he decided to find some breakfast of his own.

He drove through the town, quietly looking at the storefronts that lined the streets. They'd been through many towns like this one, always on some hunt for whatever it was Renata was desperate to find at that particular instant. The saddest thing about her quest was that she wanted nothing to do with it. Whenever she did happen upon something she'd simply stand there for a few minutes as if imbedding it in her mind and then turn away and leave. Crystals that couldn't possibly claim to originate from Earth, alien orbs, fragments of atypical bone, and shards of warm viscous metal. She walked away from it all. She wanted to be prepared to ignore it, not to be sucked into some warring scheme set into motion long ago by a race of creatures she couldn't even bring herself to admit she was a part of.

When the letter and photograph showed up in their mailbox, detailing the whereabouts of the royal four and the granolith, she had held it in trembling hands. Weren't they the reason he and Renata had been developed to begin with, a careful blending of human genetics with those of the people who were supposed to help the others, lead them home.

Their originators, their engineers, hadn't anticipated that their hybrid creations would dispute their destinies. They hadn't counted on them having souls and feelings and hopes for themselves. They hadn't expected them to become so… so human.

~~~

Tess and Kyle ordered breakfast. Their stomachs, tired of camp fare, had ended the dispute over whether they were too worried to eat or not. Lacing her pancakes and whipped cream with a liberal amount of Tabasco, Tess listened to the conversation that revolved around her first experience with the great outdoors. Normalcy was something they often lacked and it was just a taste of what they all might have been able to enjoy, once upon a time.

Kyle kept regaling them with one humorous, if not horribly embarrassing, anecdote after another, bringing laughs and chuckles from the group and even Tess found herself enjoying his comical tale although most of the humor was at her expense. From an outsider's perspective, they were just a normal bunch of teenagers.

That was the impression Jordan got when he walked into the diner again. He wouldn't have given them a second thought if it hadn't been for the strange pull he felt from the table; a pull that was in no way human and that he had dreaded coming in contact with ever since he and Renata had discovered why they'd been sent to Earth. It wasn't so much that he hadn't believed Renata, he had learned that her instincts were deadly accurate, it was more that he hadn't wanted to believe her.

He slid onto a seat at the counter, carefully selecting a location where he'd be able to watch the teens as unobtrusively as possible. They were just a bunch of kids. Renata hadn't mentioned that. He had always assumed they would be older, they were sent out first after all; but no, they were just teenagers, teenagers who probably had families and homes and worried over homework and still believed in true love.

Renata was right, there was no way they'd be fulfilling their own perverse destinies. They would not uproot these children and plunge them into a world that was filled with death and destruction. Perhaps he was just as much a traitor as Renata believed herself to be but he couldn't justify destroying their lives like that.