Author's Note:After reading this part a lot of you will quite possibly hate us and be ready to stop reading this story, but give it a chance. Have faith in us, as all is not what it seems, and remember that we're both 100% Candies!

Part 3a

Maria scanned the area, her eyes wildly searching for a way to get down to Michael. He hadn't moved and he hadn't responded to her panicked screams, and she was terrified by the amount of blood that was creeping along the rocks next to his body. She was going to have to go back to find a safe way down to the bottom of the ravine and she was losing precious minutes.

She ran along the trail that led back to the house, stopping every few hundred feet to move near the edge of the overhang and look for a way down. She had covered nearly a quarter of a mile by the time she found a place that wasn't too steep to navigate and she hurried to begin the climb down. Halfway down she lost her footing and slid the rest of the way to the bottom, ignoring the cuts and scrapes on her arms as she pushed herself to her feet and ran back along the river towards Michael.

She slid to a stop when she reached him, suddenly terrified of what she was going to find. His breathing was labored, but the rasping sound meant that he was alive. She fell to her knees beside him, her hands framing his face as she called his name, her tone urgent.

Receiving no response from him she started to run her hands over his body, searching for the injuries that were responsible for his unconscious state. Her hands paused over his chest when she realized that his ribcage was caved in on his left side.

"Oh, my God," she whispered hoarsely. "Michael…" She placed her hands on his cheeks and gently turned his face to her. "Michael, I need you to wake up." His face was unmarked with the exception of fresh bruising but he still didn't respond to her voice. She carefully eased his body up so she could see the injury that was causing him to bleed all over the place. She couldn't see the wound and she was scared to move him too much, terrified that she would only hurt him worse than he already was.

"M'ria…" His voice was slurred and weak, but she rejoiced when she heard it. She eased him back down and moved up closer to his head so he could see her. "M'ria, what happened? Can't feel anything but this pain in my chest."

"Michael…" Fear gripped her when she realized that his gaze was unfocused and glassy.

He tried to raise his right arm to cover his mouth when he felt the tickle in his throat but he couldn't seem to make it move. He coughed weakly and cried out when the pain in his chest became unbearable.

Maria's eyes widened when she saw the blood beginning to trickle down from one corner of his mouth. "Michael, Michael, baby, focus on me, please," she begged, her eyes locked on his. He was trying to focus on her, she could see the effort he was making, but before long he lost the fight and the darkness pulled him under again. "God, no, don't do this to me, Michael." She released her hold on him as she ran her hands over his pockets, searching for the prepaid cell phone he carried everywhere.

Each of the couples had one prepaid cell phone in the case of an emergency and as her fingers finally closed on it she prayed Max would answer.

Max Evans reached for the cell phone apprehensively. A call on this phone could only mean bad news and his mind was already running through the list of possibilities as he answered it. "Hello?" He froze when he heard the hysterical voice coming from the other end and he hurried to try and calm her down. "Maria? Maria, you've gotta calm down, I can't understand you."

The only thing he understood was Michael's name, the rest of her words were running together and were so garbled that he couldn't distinguish them from each other. He grabbed the keys to the car he shared with his wife and locked up before running out of the house. He had to get to Liz; she was the only one who stood a chance of calming Maria down enough to get a coherent explanation out of her.

Maria shifted around after pulling off the sweatshirt she had pulled on over her tee shirt that morning, covering Michael with it and cradling his head in her lap. She had finally gotten off the phone with Liz, who had been able to decipher her tearful monologue, but only after receiving confirmation that she and Max were already on their way. They're four hours away, her mind taunted. They'll never get here in time.

"They will get here," she swore, pressing a kiss to Michael's forehead. "Nothing else is acceptable."

He groaned quietly and his eyes suddenly shot open as he tried to draw in gasping breaths, his left hand ineffectively clawing at his chest as more blood trailed from the corner of his mouth. He was getting weaker before her very eyes and the fact that she was able to hold him down by pinning his shoulders to the ground testified to his weakness.

"You have to stay still, Michael." She caressed his face, trying in vain to keep his gaze focused on her. "Listen to me… please," she whispered, her voice cracking on the plea. "I think your ribs are broken and I'm pretty sure you've punctured one of your lungs; if you move you're only gonna make it worse."

"M'ria… can't feel… how long…?"

Maria struggled to follow his ramblings as her gaze moved down his body to his legs. He hadn't moved them, hadn't even tried to, and she was afraid to try to straighten them out for fear of causing more harm. No feeling more than likely indicated a spinal injury and any movement could hurt him even more.

She glanced at her watch, surprised to see that nearly two hours had passed since he had fallen from the overhang. "Max will be here soon, Michael, we just have to wait for him, okay?" She had to keep him calm, which meant she had to keep her emotions under control so he couldn't see how close she was to losing it.

"Night… how long?"

Night? What was he… Oh, God, no! Please, no! Maria hurried back up so that she was kneeling next to his shoulders. Swallowing hard she held one hand in front of his eyes and moved it back and forth. Her heart sank in her chest when he continued to stare straight ahead. She forced the tears back and settled down with his head in her lap once more. "It's been dark for a couple of hours, but Max will be here soon to make things right again."

"Can't feel…"

Maria could feel her heart shredding when his confused rambling went back to the paralysis in his legs. "It'll be okay, Michael. Don't think about your legs, please? As soon as Max gets here he'll fix you up as good as new and then he'll tell you what an idiot you are for standing so close to the edge of that damned overhang."

"No, M'ria…" His left hand flailed as he searched for hers and she quickly wrapped her hand around his. His hand dropped weakly to his chest and he sighed raggedly. "Don' un'erstan'," he slurred. "Can' feel you…"

"Can't feel me? No, Michael, you're holding my hand. I'm right here, baby." Now she was rambling and she couldn't seem to stop herself. "I'm not going anywhere, Michael, I'm right here. Do you hear me?"

His breathing was getting worse, more labored, by the minute, and there wasn't anything she could do to help him. The blood beneath his body had slowed considerably, but at the same time the trail of blood at the corner of his mouth was seeping out at an alarming rate.

"M'ria?" he called for her, his voice loud as his hand clenched tightly around hers.

"Right here, Michael."

"Can' feel you."

She suddenly realized what he was saying; he wasn't talking about not being able to feel his legs, he was talking about their connection. She swallowed the panic that set in with a vengeance and she choked back a sob. "Michael, listen to me, baby. You've gotta stay with me, do you hear me? You've gotta hold on. Please? Max will be here soon, I promise."

"N'ver leave you, M'ria."

Silence suddenly fell over them and she stared at him, her own breath freezing in her chest.

"Michael?" She leaned over him, searching for any sign that he was still alive and not finding any. He had stopped breathing, she couldn't locate a pulse, and when she placed her head against his chest she couldn't find his heartbeat. She sat up and her hands knotted in his shirt as she shook him violently. "Michael! Michael, you can't go like this… you can't leave me like this! You promised!" She screamed at his lifeless body, begged and pleaded with him to come back to her, until she had no strength left in her body and she slumped over him as heart-wrenching sobs were ripped from her very soul.

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An hour later a pair of hands reached out to gently extract Maria from Michael's lifeless body and she fought against them wildly, screaming as she struggled to maintain her hold on the person who had been her reason for living.

"Maria, you've gotta let him go," Max said, his voice thick with pain at the sight of his best friend lying there, unmoving. "C'mon, honey, let him go."

"I'll take her, Max," Kyle offered, pulling her to her feet and wrapping his arms around her tightly when she started to beat her small fists against his chest. He held her while watching Max attempt to revive Michael using his healing powers, not realizing he was holding his breath until the other man leaned back on his heels and shook his head.

"Is there anything else we can do?" Liz asked, her concerned gaze bouncing between her husband and her best friend.

"I can't help him," Max said, feeling that he had failed all of them. "He's been gone too long. The only thing we can do is bury him."

"No!" Maria screamed. "You have to fix this! I promised him you'd fix it!"

"Maria, that was a bad fall and his injuries were extensive; I don't know that I could've healed him even if we had gotten here in time." He shook his head. "I'm sorry."

"We can't bury him," Isabel said, speaking up for the first time. She moved closer to Michael's body and knelt down beside it as tears slipped silently down her face. "Not here."

"Not anywhere!" Maria broke free of Kyle's arms and paced restlessly, knowing she was being irrational and not caring. Her reason for living, for breathing, for everything, was lying dead on the ground, while everyone around him discussed what they should do with his body. God, if she could only go back and stop him from being so damned impulsive and running out to look over that stupid overhang. "Oh, my God!" She dried the tears from her face and forced her emotions back under control as she knelt down beside him and pressed a kiss to his cold lips. "I know how to fix this," she whispered.

"Maria?" Isabel's tone was wary, unsure of what type of approach to take with the woman who was suddenly, eerily calm.

"We have to take him to the Granolith," Maria announced suddenly. "It's capable of time travel, it protected the pods for years before you hatched, and it can bring him back." She nodded decisively. "We have to take him back to the cave."

The other four looked at each other, considering what she was saying. Maria was distraught over her loss and she was switching emotional gears in a very erratic manner, but none of them were ready to contradict her belief that the Granolith could solve the problem.

Max nodded when Liz caught his eye, silent communication passing between them with nothing more than a look. "We'll take him to the cave," he said decisively.

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The decision to take Michael to the cave proved to be the last decisive act Max had been able to make. As he had eased Michael's body down on the floor of the van with Kyle's help the reality of the situation had suddenly hit him and he would surely have fallen to his knees if the other man hadn't grabbed him and stabilized him against the side of the vehicle.

"Max, you can't fall apart right now," Kyle insisted. "There's too much at stake here. We've gotta hold it together for the girls, man." But he knew as soon as he leaned forward to get a good look at him that Max was lost and he wasn't going to be able to make any decisions for the group. "Okay, here's what we're gonna do," he said, taking that weight onto his own shoulders. "I'll lead the way and Isabel will ride with me. I think it'd be a bad idea to separate Liz and Maria at this point, and there's no way you're gonna separate Maria from Michael."

Max turned his head slowly, his gaze locked on the woman who was sitting on the floor next to Michael's body, his head cradled in her lap as she spoke to him quietly. If he hadn't known any better he would've thought the man lying there was simply napping, but he knew his best friend wasn't going to be waking from this sleep.

"Max, buddy, I learned a long time ago that where you guys and this whole alien mess are concerned just about anything is possible. We've seen too much and lived through too much to give up now. So let's go to the cave and see what happens."

"I'll follow you. Yeah, that's a… that's a good idea." Max nodded, suddenly galvanized into action, and he hurried around to the drivers' side, climbing in and starting the engine.

Kyle stopped Liz when she moved past him to step up into the van. "Liz?"

Liz swallowed hard and turned her head to look at him. "Yeah?"

"Are you gonna be able to keep an eye on both of them?" he asked. She had two people to watch over, the two most important people in her world, and he knew it wasn't going to be easy to see both of them in so much pain.

"I can handle them," Liz answered, praying she was right about that.

Kyle shut the door once she was safely inside and ran over to his truck when he saw that Isabel was already inside, waiting for him. God, when was it going to stop? How much did they have to suffer before bad things stopped happening? He started the truck and pulled out of the driveway, heading towards the highway that would take them as close to home as they had been in way too long. His thoughts eventually turned to the reason that they couldn't go home and from there it wasn't long before his mind settled on the tragedy that was sending them back to where it had all began.

He had never really interacted with Michael, even before he had known about the guy being an alien. Michael had seemed dangerous before he had known about the powers he possessed, and after he knew the truth about him, Kyle had been certain that it only made him more dangerous. He had been shocked to learn that Maria was dating the guy, but after a while he had realized that it made a crazy kind of sense. She wasn't afraid of anything, and she was just as weird as Michael… weirder, maybe.

They had been on the road for a couple of months, dodging the F.B.I. Special Unit before he and Michael had connected. Once he had gotten to know the other man he had slowly started to change his opinion about him. Michael understood Kyle's love of sports, he liked motorcycles and sports cars, and he enjoyed watching attractive women at every possible opportunity despite the fact that he was clearly taken.

They had bonded over their common interests and he could easily remember how much it always pissed off Maria and Isabel when they had really gotten into one of their heated debates over hot chicks, cool cars, or sports. He had never understood why Maria had fallen so hard for Michael or why she put up with him until the day they had been sitting on a park bench in Santa Monica, debating which of the bikini-clad women was the hottest.

The girls had been doing laundry in the laundromat across the street and Max was with them because… well, because he was still a newlywed and his brains were scrambled. Kyle hoped he would eventually grow out of that stage; the guy was really starting to cause a problem. The girls were beginning to think he and Michael needed to do things like offer to do the laundry, or compliment them, or other stupid things that Max was doing.

"Okay, the brunette in front of the deli," Kyle pointed out.

"Nah, dude, you're way off. The redhead in the thong, she's definitely hotter."

Kyle shook his head. "You can't be serious, man!" He shook his head when he realized that his companion wasn't going to be swayed in his opinion. "Whatever. Wonder what the chances are that Isabel could be talked into wearing one of those?"

Michael just snorted and turned his attention towards the ocean.

"Y'know, Maria's pretty hot too," Kyle mused, almost to himself. "I'll bet in that get-up she'd be - " He felt the man sitting at the other end of the bench tense up and he turned his head to look at him; in that instant he knew he had made a huge mistake and crossed a line that was never meant to be crossed.

Michael's expression had been beyond pissed off and his eyes had narrowed dangerously as he spoke, his voice controlled, but laced with anger. "I'm only gonna say this once; Maria's not some chick in a magazine and she's not one of these chicks parading around out here, so don't talk about her or treat her like she is, got it?"

Kyle swallowed hard. "Got it. Sorry."

Nothing else had ever been said about the incident, but in a few short sentences he had seen a little of what Maria saw in Michael. He had made his feelings for his girlfriend clear without making romantic declarations or spouting bits of poetry - characteristics that were better suited to Max. Michael had simply cut through all the bull and gone straight to the heart of the matter without any sort of fanfare.

He couldn't believe that the big alien was dead.

He glanced at Isabel as he led the way out to the highway, knowing that Michael's accident was dredging up memories and emotions that she kept buried deep inside in order to avoid dealing with them.

He knew probably better than anyone else that she had never gotten over losing Alex. In the time that they had been living together he had gotten used to her silences, her moods, and her detached behavior. She didn't sleep much at night unless she had exhausted herself and just couldn't go any further. He had realized that it was in those late hours of the night when she would wander the apartment aimlessly that she felt safe enough to let her barriers down and he could see the old Isabel resurface.

He had caught her talking to the empty rooms on more than one occasion and when he had questioned her about it recently she had confided in him, explaining that talking to Alex helped. Under normal circumstances he would have cracked a joke about that, but after the time they had spent together in their cramped apartment he could see the difference in her on those nights and he had left it alone.

Watching her now he could see the obvious signs of tension, the cracks in the perfect façade she presented to the world, and he wondered if this would be too much for her. In the past few months they had gotten close enough that he didn't think twice about reaching over to take her hand, the gesture intended to let her know she wasn't alone.

It was happening all over again. After losing Alex she tried different things to make herself forget, but anything that had accomplished that feat had only been a temporary fix. She had jumped into a relationship with the first guy she had met, thinking that it would dull the pain that had become her constant companion. But it hadn't dulled the pain, it had only added guilt into the mix, and she felt like she had betrayed Alex by getting involved with Jesse and then marrying him. What would happen to Maria if the Granolith couldn't bring Michael back?

When Alex had been taken from them Isabel had been surrounded by family and friends, she had been at home where she could fall apart, knowing that someone would be there to catch her. Maria didn't have that luxury; they were cut off from their families, they lived four hours from each other to maintain their safety, and she didn't even have her best friend close by to help her through what would come after. She could feel the hysteria rising within her and she cast about for something to take her mind off of what was going on.

She stared out through the dirty windshield, absently noticing that Kyle still hadn't washed the truck even though she had reminded him at least half a dozen times over the past week. "How many times do I have to tell you to wash this damn truck? God, it's not like it's a difficult task."

Kyle considered letting her comments go unchallenged, but he knew she was looking for a fight, something to take her mind off of Michael. "I'm not the only one who drives the truck, Princess."

"I'd think you'd want the damn thing to be clean considering your many dates," she snarled, grateful that he was going along with her.

"Why? I don't date them because they're into my truck."

"Your bedroom is across the hall from mine, Kyle; I think it's safe to say that I'm aware of why you date them." She glanced at the side mirror, seeing the van following behind them, and quickly forced her gaze back to the front. "And since we're on the subject, your standards seem to be getting lower."

"What?"

"That woman you brought home on Friday night? Skank, Kyle, complete skank."

"Before you start judgin' who I'm sleepin' with, let me remind you of the guy you came home with last weekend… you do remember him, don't you?"

Isabel rolled her eyes. "I am not discussing my dates with you."

"So you can talk about mine but I can't talk about yours?" He shook his head. "Since when do we pull punches with each other? The guy was a complete loser and he ate my cereal."

"God, Kyle, you've been bitching about that for a week! Move on to something else already."

Kyle's hand gripped the steering wheel tightly as he glanced at Isabel, thankful that she was bickering with him instead of getting lost in her thoughts. There were just too many bad paths that she could go down after seeing Michael like that and they all led back to that dark place that it had taken so long for her to find her way out of after losing Alex. He jumped back into the conversation when she snapped off another irritated remark and he threw one back at her to keep her mind occupied.