Chapter 9


Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

The rhythmic sound of the clock reverberating trough the room was broken by a sigh escaping from Maria's lips as she leaned back into the sofa. How did she manage to end up in this situation? This wasn't her place to be. Liz should be telling her parents this, or at least Max. Not her. Not Maria Deluca, also known as hurricane Deluca. She wasn't good in these situations. This was Liz's department. She was calm and collected. She would know what to say. She would say the right things. She would be able to reassure her parents that everything was okay, even if she had been dating an alien, making out with an alien, and eventually having sex with an alien. Maria visibly cringed at the last thought. How did you tell your best friends' parents that their daughter had been having sex with an extraterrestrial, and that they had created a child? Which now was on another planet. You didn't tell parents that. Her life was just a big joke. How did she end up in this mess?

Right. She tiredly rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. She had demanded to know what Max had done to Liz the day of the shooting. Whatever had possessed her to do that? She could've lived a normal life, happily ignorant of the fact that there were aliens living among them. But she also knew that she wouldn't have traded a single second of the life after the shooting. Even if everything was more or less fucked up, she had found some great friends in the Czechoslovakians. In fact, she doubted that she could find better ones anywhere else.

But as she looked up at the Parkers sitting across from her, she couldn't help but curse whatever forces had put her there. Well, she might as well get it over with. She took a deep breath and mentally steeled herself for whatever would come after she opened her mouth.
"How much of what Liz has written in her journal do you actually believe?"
Mr. Parker cast a glance at his wife before taking her hand and squeezing it lightly.
"Everything she had written in the journal sounded so crazy, but why would she lie in her journal? She must have believed that it was the truth. But she's talking about alien enemies, kings and princesses, conspiracies, alien hunters, the FBI... And all of this is supposed to have been taking place while she was living in our house, under our roof, and we didn't even notice it."
Mr. Parker closed his eyes, a pained expression crossing his features. "If what Liz is saying in that diary is true, then we have failed as parents."
"Jeff-" Mrs. Parker voiced softly. Her husband turned and looked at her, struggling with his emotions.
"What kind of parents were we if we couldn't even protect our child?"

Mrs. Parker dropped her eyes, a strained sob escaping her lips. Mr. Parker gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. He didn't want to hurt her, but all this was eating him up inside. How could they have been so blind? He couldn't deny that he had seen changes in his daughter during the year after the shooting in the CrashDown, but he didn't think more about it. Why hadn't he? Had his child's life not mattered to him?
"All those 'camping trips' she went on. Why didn't we look more deeply into what she was really doing? She could've gotten...killed."
"Mr. Parker," Maria interrupted. She didn't want Liz's parents to break down before they had heard the whole story. "This isn't your fault."
"Maria, we are her parents. It was our responsibility to take care of her, to look after her. How could we do that if we didn't know what people she spent her time with and where she was when she wasn't at home?"

"Liz got very good at hiding. We all did. It was necessary to lie to you."
"Why?"
"Don't you understand?" Maria asked softly. "We were only trying to protect you. The secret we carried was lethal. We were trying to keep you safe by keeping you in the dark. The less you knew, the better. But we never thought it would get so out of hand."
"The things Liz wrote in her diary," Mrs. Parker said, her voice cracking with emotions, "the way she describes Max Evans. If she only felt a fraction of what she described, the love between those two was far more deep and marvelous than I could ever imagine any love to be."

She had thought about that a lot. Even though there were some elements of alien conspiracies and FBI in her daughter's writing, it was still mainly the diary of a teenage girl. And what she had written about her feelings about Max, even without the added alien tendencies, had stunned her mother. She had been intrigued with the love her daughter described. By reading the diary many pieces had fallen into place, and she had gotten an explanation for a lot of things that had happened.

Despite the fact that her husband didn't seem to believe what Liz had written, Mrs. Parker knew that his daughter's words had affected him just as much as they had affected her. And no matter how much he tried to rationalize it, his daughter couldn't have been clearer in explaining what had happened to her. Mrs. Parker looked at the dogged jaw of her husband and knew that the main reason for him being so persistent in making Max into a monster was because he was feeling guilty. Guilty for not being there for his daughter. For not being a part of her whole life, but only the part she let him be a part of.

Maria smiled at Mrs. Parker's description of what was between Max and Liz.
"Believe me, when you see them together, you know. You know that Max would never intentionally do anything to hurt her. That he would die protecting her and she would do the same for him. I saw them together and I saw them apart, and when they are away from each other it's like they are two halves of a whole. They complete each other in ways I can't even begin to fathom. So know this, Max is not a threat. He's probably more human than anyone you have ever met. I have to admit that I was a little freaked out when I learned that there were aliens on Earth and that I actually 'knew' some of them, but after you've gotten to know them you will realize that they are no threat. They were raised human and all they want to do is survive. To lead normal lives."

"Liz mentioned that in her diary. That Max had this deep longing to be normal."
Maria nodded, a sad smile on her lips. "He wanted to be a normal boy, a boy who could have a normal relationship with the girl he loved without putting her life in danger. It was always about Liz. He would sacrifice everything for her. He would even give her up just so that she could have a normal life, away from him and all of the alieness."
"Then why didn't he?" Mr. Parker blurted out.
"Jeff!" Mrs. Parker exclaimed.
Maria could understand his reaction. He wanted to keep his daughter safe at all costs. "Like I said, it's like they aren't complete without each other. Max could've walked away, but that would have been the same as writing him a death sentence. Liz had every chance to pull out, to just say no, but she didn't. She didn't want to. She wanted Max."

"So...Max healed her," Mrs. Parker whispered, still amazed and humbled by that miraculous fact.
Maria nodded slowly. "Yes. Please try to put this into perspective. Max, Isabel and Michael had been living their entire lives in fear. They knew that they were different and that if the wrong people found out, bad things would happen to them. They could be tortured or maybe even killed. So they hid. They were always the outsiders. They just blended into the background. But that day in September, when that gun went off and Liz got shot, everything changed. Max could have chosen to stay hidden, to stay sheltered, but when he realized that Liz had been shot, there wasn't a choice to make. In some ways he gave up his own life that day. But he once told me that if he hadn't saved her that day, his life wouldn't have been worth anything. He considered his life worthless if she wasn't in it. "

Liz parents sat in a stunned silence. It had been difficult to take in everything Liz had written. The feelings she had talked about in her diary were so big, so deep, that they took on surreal proportions. But hearing Maria talk about it, confirming what they had read, somehow made it all more real. Everything started to sink in.
"But Max was captured?" Mrs. Parker asked, her heart aching as she remembered her daughter's terrified words describing the event.
Maria looked down at her fidgeting fingers, the memories of those nights flashing clearly though her mind. She had never been more terrified in her life than she had been when she found out that Liz was kidnapped, and it had all spiraled out of control when Max was captured and held by the vicious and cold-hearted Agent Pierce.
"After the shooting, everything snow-balled. First, an FBI agent infiltrated our high school."
"Ms. Topolsky?" Mr. Parker half-stated, half-asked.
"Yes. Everything Max, Isabel and Michael had fought so hard to keep hidden was revealed when Max decided to save Liz's life."

Mr. Parker shook his head. This whole situation was crazy. FBI-agents! And however much he wanted to, he could still not get over the fact that Max Evans was an alien. That boy had been sitting in their restaurant for as long as he could remember. He had always known in the back of his mind that Max had been in love with Liz. Max had practically followed his daughter around. That's when it hit him. Why had it never bothered him that Max Evans had been staring at his daughter for years? Was it only because he never did anything, that he didn't seem to be a danger? No. He could suddenly see it all so clearly. He had somehow unconsciously trusted Max.
"He will protect her. He always has," Mr. Parker said slowly.
His wife looked up questioningly at his complete turn-around about Max. "Jeff?"

Mr. Parker turned and looked at her, taking both of her hands in his. "Nancy, for as long as I can remember Max Evans has been...watching over our little girl, and I let him. It's as if I just knew that I could trust him. Maria, what did they do to him in captivity? Were they studying him?"
"I guess they were," Maria answered, "I don't really know what happened. Max never talked to me about it."
"Liz didn't write much about it in her diary either," Mrs. Parker said absent-mindedly, "That must have been a horrific experience."
"Liz was really upset about it and I only saw her reaction. I hope Liz talked to Max about it but I'm not sure that she did since she walked away from him only a day later."
"She was afraid," Mrs. Parker said, trying to defend her daughter's actions.

Maria held her hand up to stem Mrs. Parker's protests. "I'm not saying that what Liz did was wrong, I'm not saying that what she did was right either. She wanted to give Max time and space. She wanted him to make up his mind about his destiny and Tess. Also, I think that she couldn't deal with being there. Max had kissed Tess a week earlier and Liz had just learned that Tess was his bride in his former life. She wanted him to have choices. She didn't want to force herself on him. She truly loved him and she didn't want him to pick her because she was around, because she was the safe choice. If he chose her, she wanted it to be because he wanted her, not because he wanted to prove to himself that he didn't want Tess."
"Tell us about Tess," Mrs. Parker said, "Liz didn't say much about her in her diary."

Maria snorted. "I can understand why."
"What did she do that was so terrible?" Mr. Parker asked. "If I understand it correctly, Max is just as much to blame."
"I don't know about Max and why he did what he did. You'll have to talk to Max about that. But I do know that Tess was playing mind games. She was good at manipulating - in the human way - but her powers were also essentially about the mind."
"You keep referring to her in a past sense. What happened to her?" Mrs. Parker asked.
"She's dead," Maria sighed.
Mrs. Parker took a deep shuddering breath and leaned back in the sofa. They were just teenagers and yet they were dealing with all of these terrible things, things that could kill them.
"What happened?" Mr. Parker asked. He wasn't sure he really wanted to know, but if they were already stuck in this he might as well know everything.

"Tess was raised by one of the protectors, Nasedo. He was sent to protect the royal four: Max, Isabel, Michael and Tess. But when he came to get them from their pods, Max, Michael and Isabel were already gone. The only one left was Tess. Now, Nasedo was more or less on the bad side."
"How could they sent him to protect their royals if he was the man Liz describes?"
Maria shook her head. "I have no idea. The aliens who planned this trip to Earth seemed smart enough to recreate the essence of their precious royals but not smart enough to double-check who they sent with them. The ship even crashed. It just seems as if they should have stayed in the laboratory."
"So Nasedo raised Tess?" Mrs. Parker asked.

"Yes, unfortunately. Nasedo taught her how to use her powers more than the others and brought out her alien side. That is how Tess differs from the others. Max, Isabel and Michael were all raised as humans. They instinctively knew that they needed to hide their alien side to stay safe and survive so they never really worked to improve their powers. Max and Isabel both can basically control their powers, but Michael's emotions were always somewhat uncontrolled and that affected his control. That's why Nasedo had taught Tess that emotions were a weakness and that's probably why Tess was always so cold. She couldn't understand other people's emotions. She didn't care. Everything she did was according to an underlying plan to get what she wanted. She definitely didn't care about humans. I imagine that Nasedo found Tess to be a good student. He really succeeded in devaluing a human's life in her eyes. Nasedo taught her that she was Max's bride and so the main objective in her life was to get together with Max. Imagine her surprise when she found Max was in love with Liz. Since Max wasn't really so eager to cooperate with her, she had to use her gerbil mindwarps."

"What's that?" Mrs. Parker asked.
"She could plant things in your head, make you see things that weren't there. She could rearrange your memories or even remove them."
"But it still takes two to tango and as I've understood it from Liz's journal, Max wasn't completely uncooperative when he kissed Tess."
Maria shook her head. "No, he definitely wasn't. I will not defend Max's actions. I don't even want to try to justify them, but I know that Tess played a big part in that one too."
"It seems pretty unbelievable to me," Mr. Parker snorted. "I hope Max wasn't blaming it all on Tess."
"Well..." Maria hesitated. Max hadn't really denied that he had kissed Tess, but maybe that was because he couldn't since Liz had seen them. Maria hadn't really thought of that before. Would Max have told Liz that he had kissed Tess if she hadn't confronted him about it? Or would he have kept lying about it? Maria didn't know, and it wasn't really her business.

"Mr. Parker, I can't really answer that. I could only offer you speculations and bits of what Liz and Max have told me, but I won't do that because I would probably skew the truth unintentionally. But that incident isn't really important anymore."
"It's important for us to understand what kind of person Max is," Mr. Parker objected.
"Max has changed a lot in the recent years. He's not the same person he was before, so I don't know if that is even relevant anymore. Tess, on the other hand, was no saint. She worked for the 'bad guys', and she was evidently killed by the people she worked for."
"That's terrible," Mrs. Parker said. Maria could do nothing else than shrug her shoulders. She didn't have much sympathy left for Tess. Not after all the years she had robbed of Max and Liz, as well as everything she had done after that.
"Maria," Mrs. Parker said, silencing her husband with a stern look. This wasn't really what she wanted to talk about. She wanted to know how this all fitted together. How it all led up to her daughter dying, but not really dying. She was tired of being kept in the dark. She wanted to know about all the things that Liz hadn't written in her diary. There were five years that she still didn't know about. What had been going on if her daughter hadn't been dead? Where had she been, and why hadn't she contacted her parents?

"Please, tell me. Was Liz held captive by the FBI?"
Maria's eyes widened in surprise. "What?"
"She was missing for five years, Maria," Mrs. Parker continued. "Where was she?"
Maria relaxed some. "In Santa Fe."
"What was she doing in Santa Fe?" Mr. Parker asked.
Maria dropped her eyes, fingering one of the buttons on her skirt. "Raising her child."
Simultaneously Liz's parents bolted up from their seats. "What?!"