They'd apprised Kyle of the situation on the drive back from the airport. After a freak out much shorter than Maria's had been he'd settled into deal-with-it mode.

"You're definitely one hundred percent sure? You couldn't have been a tiny bit mistaken?" He was sitting on Liz's sofa, clearly putting a great deal of effort into remaining seated and still instead of jumping up to join Maria's pacing.

"How many times are you going to ask that?" Liz sighed, "Yes, Tess as well."

"Okay but," Kyle raised a hand, "What if it was a different Tess? Not the most uncommon name, right?"

"Kyle," Liz rolled her eyes, "It's not like I heard her name or saw her face. I got the impression of her and the emotional response to seeing her. Trust me, there is no other Tess in any solar system that would get that flavour of emotional response from you."

"Right," Kyle dropped his head into his hands with a groan, "Right. Of course, you're right. You're always right. I just don't want it to be true."

"None of us want it to be true." Maria snorted scornfully.

"But why would they even be with Tess?" Kyle gave up on sitting and jumped up to pace perpendicularly to Maria. "Tess betrayed them as much as she betrayed us. If they're with her then does that mean that they won't be coming of their own free will? Will other aliens be coming too? Is it all a trap or an invasion? Or did they forgive her while they were away?"

"I don't know," Liz flopped back in her chair to stare at the ceiling, away from her constantly moving friends. "I've literally told you everything I know so far. It could be any of those. Or something else entirely. For all we know she could still have them thinking she's an ally. Maybe she somehow kept the truth from them the whole time. Who knows what's happened to them while they've been gone."

"So what are we going to do?" Maria finally settled on the arm of Liz's chair. "We can't just sit back and wait to see what happens."

"I think…" Liz frowned, "I think that we can't trust Tess. Which means that we can't trust our own senses or memories when we're around Tess. And I think that, much as we might like to give everybody else great big hugs to welcome them home, we have to prepare for the worst possible situations. Which means, until we have something to go on, we can't trust any of them. Not completely."

"So, basically," Kyle summarised, "We have a couple of weeks to prepare for potentially hostile aliens to show up."

Liz nodded, "But we do have a few things going for us. We're not just helpless humans anymore, and they don't know that."

…

The first weeks had been the hardest.

Maria had gotten obsessed with trying to contact them, getting in touch with the most insane conspiracy theorists in the hopes of finding some clue about where they had gone or when they might come back.

Kyle was having trouble dealing with the recovered memories and no amount of meditation was stopping the nightmares and panic attacks that were triggered by the most benign things.

Liz got angry again.

She'd found Alex's murderer, as she'd promised she would, but in the process they'd lost so much more. And still, there were so many things she didn't know. Things she couldn't find out now.

And through it all, there was the search for four missing teens that was consuming the town. Max and Isabel's parents were devastated. The police were asking all of them questions, and in all of the chaos none of them seemed capable of the quality lies that they'd gotten so accomplished at.

It was only Valenti's interference that kept them from getting in real trouble. That and the fact that there was no evidence of any actual crime.

Liz and Maria spent two days going through all of Tess's things. Maria was hoping to find some way to contact them while Liz was desperate for an answer to the question that plagued her now.

Why?

Why would Tess do this?

Kyle had told them that she might not have killed Alex on purpose, that it seemed like she was trying to mind-warp him and he just died. But that didn't make anything better. Even if she hadn't meant to kill anyone she had stripped people of their own free will just to get what she wanted. Just to translate the book, when anyone could have done that. Tess could have gone to Las Cruces herself, but instead she stayed in Roswell while she forced Alex to do it for her.

The more she thought about it, the more she felt like everything had happened too quickly. It just seemed so convenient that she and Maria had found the translation of the book, which just happened to have instructions on how the aliens could get home, right when Tess fell pregnant with a baby that couldn't survive on Earth.

Liz had come up with a dozen different reasons why Tess might have manipulated things that way, but nothing that really answered why.

Tess had so much here. The Valenti's had given her a home and a family. The whole group had given her friendship and welcome. Why would she want to leave that? Why would she want to drag the others with her?

…

After a few months things had started to get better. Or rather, they started to notice that things had already been getting better.

Liz remembered rock bottom as being three weeks after the departure, when Mrs Evans had come to see her. Max and Isabel's mother had been distraught. She'd cried and yelled and begged for Liz to tell her anything and everything. She'd insisted that she knew there was something Liz and her friends weren't telling them. She'd wept that she knew how much Max loved Liz and that he wouldn't have left without saying goodbye to her as well.

Liz had cried too as she lied to the woman in front of her, wondering if she could just tell the truth. But she hadn't. Instead she'd lied, badly, and kept the secrets of the friends who had abandoned her.

Things hadn't exactly gotten easier after that encounter, but they definitely hadn't gotten worse. And a few weeks after that she realised it wasn't quite as hard to look people in the eye when she lied to them anymore.

After a couple of weeks of intense anxiety and destructive guilt Kyle had started seeing a counsellor who specialised in trauma survivors. He eventually agreed to go along to a support group that mostly catered to survivors of rape and domestic violence. He admitted to Liz that he'd felt stupid and intrusive when he showed up since he hadn't really been attacked in the way these people had, but then he'd heard them speak and had recognised in their words his own feelings and experience. It had helped a lot to hear other people talk about how hard it was to believe that what happened to them wasn't their fault even when they could spell out all the reasons why it had to be true.

Meanwhile, Maria had sped all the way down the crazy obsessive path; hitting dead end after dead end of absurd alien theories, watching the sky for hours in the hopes that something would appear, going out to the desert with sledgehammers and drills trying to get into the pod chamber to find any clues that might have been left behind.

Then one day she just stopped.

She told Liz that she'd spent enough of her life on these aliens. They'd made their own choices, manipulated or not. Michael had chosen to leave her. She was choosing to move on.

Liz watched her do just that with envy. Max had made his own decisions too. He'd chosen to ignore her warnings that Alex had been murdered. He'd slept with Tess and gotten her pregnant. He'd chosen his own path. And yet, Liz couldn't just move on and let it go. Alien drama had been such a huge part of her life for so long, she didn't really know how to live without it.

But she tried. It took time, but she eventually started to feel normal again. She got used to talking about weekend plans and university applications instead of alien powers and government agents. She made new friends and re-engaged with old ones. She taught herself how to be human again and she finally started to believe that she might have a normal, ordinary life to look forward to.

And then she started hallucinating and setting things on fire with a touch.

Totally meant to get this posted before now. I'm incredibly talented at procrastination. Sorry. Thanks for the awesome reviews! I'm so glad that you can see the potential here. Hopefully I can follow through on that.