Part 11
Maria closed the door to the hallway behind her. She wasn't sure why she did, just that she didn't think Michael could stand to watch her interacting with the people who had caused him such pain, even if they were unseen to him. She glanced around the room fully for the first time. The door she entered from sat on a wall taken directly from her house. The aged wood stood out in stark contrast to the glossy brilliance of the other three white-painted walls, direct from the world Michael presently resided in.
She crossed the floor to his bed, wondering if she could interact with him at all or just sit quietly by, not touching anyone or thing. She remembered a particularly frightening night when Isabel had paid her a visit in dreamland several years before. She had reached out to touch the other girl's hand and both of them had immediately woken up in their own beds, a cold sweat breaking out on their bodies as if they had experienced the same, joint, terrifying nightmare.
With that memory, she decided to stay clear of the technician, evil bastard, should he reenter the room, but she couldn't restrain herself from resting her hand gently on Michael's arm. He was asleep anyway, she reasoned, so he wouldn't even know she was there.
Maria watched for any sign of reaction on his face as she sat quietly by his bed. The only signs were of torment as his body fought against the restraints holding him still and his face contorted in agony at the tumultuous thoughts streaking through his brain. She placed a hand on his head, smoothing his sweat-drenched hair off of his face as she stared longingly at his features. He looked so… same.
She had expected to be surprised by the difference in the aged Michael outside her door and the version she had known so intimately only a year ago. Instead, she found both renderings comforting, the boy she had loved hardly changing at all in the prison he now called home, and the man she had also loved, albeit a lifetime ago, aging gracefully even through hardship as she had known he would. She always had been attracted to his ruggedness. Carving the lines just a little more deeply with time only made her more so.
Her contemplations were interrupted as a door on one of the white walls opened and the same technician from before entered. Maria cursed beneath her breath as she watched him approach, ready to forget her promise to stay out of his way and attack him, screaming like a banshee to prevent further injury to Michael. She was saved the need to intervene as she observed him adjust the knobs on one of the machines near the bed and make notes in a small chart. It was only as she dissected the evilness that was him that she noticed the security badge pinned to his lab coat and knew she had found the information she was looking for.
Creeping around the bed, she hovered delicately over his left arm, careful not to touch him in any way as she memorized the information printed clearly on the plastic label. 'Jasper' it read loudly. The idiot bastard who thought torturing someone was an adequate way to make a living was named 'Jasper'. And he worked for 'Sigmund Solutions—Servicing ALL Your Patient Needs'. Maria thought she was going to puke.
Stepping away from the man, she smiled at the victory she had just claimed, only five minutes inside and she already knew the name of the company responsible for his care, or damage as it were, and the person that she would personally see jailed for performing the 'services'. She wanted to run back into the hallway to tell Michael but couldn't tear herself away from the boy lying on the bed just yet.
Jasper left the room without further incident and she retook her seat at Michael's side, watching as he settled into a more peaceful state, no doubt thanks to the drugs pouring into his arm from the adjustments just made. Leaning over to bring her lips close to his ear, she whispered, "You're in there, aren't you?" Her hand rested on his head for a moment before she removed all distance between them and reached down to brush her lips lightly across his mouth, remembering his same words to her as she added, "Hang on baby. I'm coming to get you."
She pried herself away from his body reluctantly, turning quickly towards the door before the tears threatening to fall from her eyes materialized. As she left, the boy on the bed stirred slightly, his brain fighting to sound a word, any word, to speak to the apparition that had just visited him. It wasn't possible that it was really her, was it? He could barely control his conscious thought, let alone make sense of a dream that seemed so real that he wanted to reach out and touch her.
Maria had visited him?
No, it wasn't possible. He had stopped thinking about her months ago, the memory too painful to store in his brain as his existence dragged on in the hell that was his universe. The appearance of her today had to be attributed to thoughts that were too powerful to repress stubbornly resurfacing. She wasn't actually here, she hadn't actually found a way to connect.
He recalled bitterly that the one person not trapped in his hell-on-earth was the only member of their tiny group who hadn't generated alien powers of some kind. He cursed himself for ever wishing that she required the healing power necessary to spark 'the change', but right now he would gladly trade her body for Liz's in the Crashdown that day almost four years ago just so she could cross the barriers separating them and he could talk to her one more time.
He knew he didn't want that to happen before the fragments ever formed themselves into solid ideas and hated himself for even imagining it. It was better that she remain untouched by him, pure beauty unmarred by his alien ugliness. He never deserved to even know her; her life should have been created from love and happiness, not devastation and death. His tortured brain finally submitted to a blissful unconsciousness as he eased his torment with the knowledge that she was living a better life without him in it. He trusted that somewhere, beyond the walls of thought that kept her memory trapped inside, she was happy.
~~~~~
Maria crouched by Michael's side in the hallway of her house. He appeared to be asleep, his head bowed on his knees that were tucked close to his chest. She touched his arm delicately, shrieking when his head snapped up to grin at her.
"Missed me, didn't you?"
Laughing, she joined him in a seated position on the floor, smiling at the unfamiliar moment of happiness that passed between them. It was fleeting, replaced too quickly with his furrowed brow as he examined her body for any signs of injury after her journey.
"You okay?"
"Of course," she replied, smiling at him with a confidence she didn't feel. She was okay, there was no question of that, it was him that wasn't, not the him that was trapped in the hell she had just visited anyway. She knew that she had found some answers to where he was being kept but her veins coursed with apprehension as she worried about translating this information to Michael, fearing the danger he would call upon himself in an effort to reverse the capture.
"I… I found out some stuff," she offered slowly.
There was no response from his lips, only a pleading look in his eyes to continue, and fast.
She swallowed stiffly, lowering her eyes for a moment as she recalled the scraps of information she was able to gather. "His name is Jasper," she said quietly. "He's the one that's hurting you and he works for this Sigmund place. Sigmund Solutions. They have a crazy motto too—servicing all your patient needs or something. Liars."
His eyes widened at the crucial yet scant details she was able to provide. Over a year, at least, in the confines of that place and he had only a vague recollection of what the man looked like, he knew none of the precious facts that she had uncovered so easily.
"How?" he mumbled.
Smiling, she shrugged as she responded, "He had a security badge with all this written on it—pretty dumb if you ask me."
"Well there was never a chance of us escaping, no risk really."
"Still…"
The once enrapt lovers stared at each other thoughtfully for a moment, Maria finally breaking the silence with the question that haunted both of their minds. "What are you going to do?"
"Honestly?" he asked. "I have no clue."
"Well you have a name, maybe you can find their offices or something."
"Ria," he sighed. "This place could be huge, or there could be fifty places, hundreds, they could be worldwide for all we know. We're probably just as lost now as we were five minutes ago."
"Well I'll go back in," she offered quickly, moving to rise to her feet.
"No," he snapped, grabbing her arm to keep her firmly planted on the ground.
"Michael," she said slowly, staring at him questioningly.
"I'm sorry," he muttered, loosening his hold but keeping his hand still resting on her forearm. "I don't want you going back in there. You have no idea what you're doing, what realm you are crossing to connect with him… with me like that. You could get trapped, or lost… I can't risk that."
"I'm not going to get lost, I'm just in the bedroom."
"You are not in the bedroom!" he yelled, her body jerking backwards as his words assaulted her skin savagely. "You are in the place that we lost our souls in Maria. The place that stripped us of every last dignity we possessed. We were shells by the time we ever got to Antar, every thought, every memory, every instinct for survival stripped from our minds."
He panted slightly as he stared at her face, the shock of his words leaving an indelible imprint on her skin. "They raped us," he added, his voice softening to a bare whisper. "Every day, for what might as well have been an eternity, it sure as hell felt like one. I would never wish that on you, and to even have you witness it…" his voice broke as he squeezed his eyes shut against the violent images of the same fate befalling her. "That's a horror I never want you to know."
Somehow she managed to suppress the sobs rising in her throat. As she looked at the agony etched in the age-revealing lines of his face, she felt every pain he had known leave his body and pass into hers. She knew it was imagined, but the sheer terror of his words was enough to draw her spirit into the nightmare he had lived and prove to her that she would never want to know it.
"Come back with me," he whispered to her, his eyes still shut tightly to avoid her expected negative response.
"Michael," she breathed.
"Ria, please," he begged, staring at her from water-laden pools. "I don't want you to stay here, you think it's safe but it isn't. You don't belong here, and you definitely don't belong where I am. You deserve to be back in your world, you need to be back there."
His words were inarguable, she did not belong in the torture he experienced, perhaps she didn't even belong in the house any longer, but there was something he didn't know about the torture she had lived in their time apart—the full extent of what she had endured at her own hands while he was victim of forces beyond his control.
"Can I show you something?" she whispered softly.
His eyes stared at hers, questioning her motive as she stood from the floor and held her hand out for him to grasp. He followed her lead, moving behind her along the hallway and down the creaking staircase. At the bottom, she turned and stopped in front of the hole she had crawled out of the day before.
"Can you make that a little bigger?" she asked.
"You can't go back in," he cautioned weakly, fear that she was running again seizing his heart in a vice-like grip.
"I don't want to go in," she prodded gently. "I want you to."
"You want me…"
"Just make it bigger? Please?"
He complied wordlessly, dropping to his knees to yank on the boards still barricading the hole. In a few minutes it was wide enough to allow both of them space to crawl through and he sat back as she entered, following close behind her.
Inside, he felt his way through the darkness by reaching a hand out to follow the trail of her retreating foot. He crawled after her towards the back of the tiny cavern until she stopped suddenly and his momentum carried him forward, tumbling on top of her in a pile of haphazard limbs.
"Sorry," he mumbled, a smile evident in his voice as his face buried itself in the softness of her breast.
"Easy boy," she teased, pushing away from him, however slowly, to sit against the far wall of the tight space.
Michael sat up as well, feeling for her knee to guide himself into the same position. He sat facing her, or at least thought he did, as the light from the entryway did not penetrate this far into the space they occupied. Without asking for permission, he felt for the wall to his side and swiped his hand along the surface, a trail of shimmering gold light stretching out from the contact.
He sought out her face in the illuminated crevasse, smiling at the glow dancing in her eyes, the gold setting off the deep green elegantly. The words to tell her how beautiful she looked were just forming on his lips when her head turned slightly and he found his gaze drawn in the direction she peered. The gasp from his lips was barely audible as the vision before him settled onto his brain, telling the story of her life inside the house in picturesque fashion.
On the wall were hundreds, possibly thousands, of snapshots of her life. All photographed moments that were doubtlessly locked away in photo albums on dusty shelves in the Deluca home, burned into her memory from hours of staring at them. Images of happier moments as a child, together with her mother and father, began the saga, a small smile playing on his lips as he recognized the precious Dalmatian she had showed him images of in past connections. Too soon, the joy was replaced with sadness, her life moving from the perfect family setting to one of single parenthood, a life that while happy had created too many questions in her life to bring complete satisfaction.
The years passed in rapid succession, the strongest memories presented in the brightest color, always with a longing in her eyes, a small frown playing at the corners of her mouth as she forced a smile for the camera. His eyes roamed over the canvas, wincing at the pain she had never fully revealed to him, coming to rest on a truly happy face at age 16. They were standing in the Crashdown, just a normal day at work when Isabel had gone picture happy and began snapping shots of everything in sight. The picture was taken from the pass-through to the kitchen, his face frowning at the camera from his position by the grill. She was in the background, slightly blurred from her position in the kitchen doorway, standing just outside the field of focus. She stared not at the camera but at him, the smile that lit her eyes mirrored on her mouth, in her stance, in the emotions rolling out of the image to attack his brain.
She was happy, for the first time in the years of memories she had portrayed, she was happy, and it was because of him.
His eyes closed as he paused for a respite from the emotions attacking his brain through his eyes. He knew what the following pictures would reveal, happiness for three short years until the day he left her, until the day he died in her eyes and she barricaded herself inside her mind with the few truly happy moments she had known in her young life.
A tentative hand reached out to touch his in the darkness, his fingers flinching as her tiny hand enclosed itself within his. The gentle pressure against his palm forced his eyes open and he stared blankly at the continuation of the story before him. He didn't want to see it, didn't want to acknowledge the agony that her isolation in this existence had caused her, it was so much easier to imagine the house as a protective shield, hiding her from the painful reality that she had indeed lost every person she ever called a friend.
The house was not protective; the house was vicious, relentless, as it presented constant reminders of the horror that had brought her within its walls. The images showed the daily reminders that she lived with of the van bursting into flames, the bright orange tongues licking the night air against the contrasting simplistic beauty of the Roswell desert. These pictures were not taken by any camera, no film processing necessary as the visuals embossed themselves for all eternity on her brain. The lives of her friends were stamped out in a brief moment, the act irreversible as she was condemned to exist with the knowledge that she was so close to the violence as it occurred yet powerless to save them.
That was the torment she had to live with. That was how she had spent the last year of her life.
He knew in an instant that she was strong enough to return to his world again and again, braver than he could have ever been to live with her self-created torture and come out the other side relatively unscarred. Granted she was still in hiding, but time would take care of that last obstacle, in that he had complete faith.
"You can go back in," he mumbled softly.
She smiled at his sentiment, knowing all along that he was powerless to make her leave, but wanting him to accept her decision as the only choice. She wasn't staying for fear of returning to reality, that was why she had remained here for so long already but it was no longer about being afraid of the life she had once led. Now it was about him, the him that was still trapped in his own hell and as long as he was there so would she be here.