Roswell Fan Fiction - Crush in Three Acts
Title: Crush in Three Acts
Rating: T
Pairing: Liz Parker/Max Evans
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: I do not own, no matter how much I wish I did.
Summary: A one-shot Max POV set the summer before episode 1 takes place.
June
His daydreams are teal infused. He struggles to remember when that started, maybe at the beginning, the day he stepped off the bus, and Isabel shook her hand free of his. For a moment, he was an un-tethered balloon, drifting away and insubstantial. He imagined eventually he would be a speck high above the playground. Some might have found the sensation exhilarating, but he thought it was mostly awful.
Then a dark haired girl with a jump rope dangling from one hand caught his eye and smiled. He did not smile back, but her kind eyes gave him weight again, and he forced himself to put one foot in front of the other until he caught up to Isabel. He looked over his shoulder. The dark haired girl shimmered like a memory, someone he had known once upon a time. That could not be true though; he suspected he had only come into existence just recently. He did not have a once upon a time.
No, things weren’t teal yet, but he was already daydreaming.
Ten years later her knee bumps his on the first day of school, and just like that, they are lab partners. It is easier to talk to her than he had imagined, but he still gets words all wrong every now and then whenever she is near. On the last day before summer vacation, she catches up to him in the mostly empty hallway. He has to look over his shoulder, to make sure she isn’t smiling like that at someone else. “Next year, if we have bio together, promise me, you will be my lab partner. You’re the only one who takes notes as good as mine.”
Now, that teal color tugs at him like a tide, pulling him closer, then under, and turning every action into a slow motion day dream.
He watches her over the top of his menu. When she is near, it is as if the color teal has taken over the rainbow. Every other color is muted by it, and it is just . . . her.
He wants to capture the color. Hold it in the palm of his hand, change its molecular structure into something solid, something beautiful.
To her, maybe it would look like plain old Turquoise. Something you could get at the Mesaliko reservation, but it would be his heart.
“What is up with you?” Michael rudely interrupts, and he drops his eyes back to the menu, although he already knows what he wants. “I think we should look tomorrow, the place near those lakes.”
“Isabel has plans.”
“Then just us. Come on Maxwell, what have we got to lose?”
Unlike Michael, he hasn’t been thinking about the crash lately. The concept of a distant home planet was truthfully the furthest thing from his mind this summer. Isabel had already lost interest in hunting around the desert for forty year old artifacts. Michael was like a dog with a bone. Max didn’t think Michael would ever let it go.
“We’ll talk about it later,” he deflects as a waitress who is not Liz approaches.
Michael sighs loudly and shoots him a frustrated look.
He doesn’t have the heart to tell Michael that it doesn’t matter whether they find the ship or not. That to him Roswell is home, not some distant planet. As long as they kept their alien powers in check and did not expose themselves, he could be perfectly content fitting in and making a good life for himself right here on Earth.
He looks up to see Liz Parker, a plate in both hands examining a stack of pictures a customer had spread out on the table. She nods a serious look on her face, but as she sets down the plates, she has to bite down on a smile.
She catches him looking, and good-naturedly rolls her eyes before turning back to the tourists.
July
Heat shimmers over the concrete. Max hears the tail end of Isabel’s laughter as he sinks into the cool water. It is bright and then dark, then teal when he opens his eyes.
He holds his breath. Teal is the color of the succulents growing along the back fence, the Aegean sea, peacock feathers . . . teal is the color of Liz Parker.
When he comes to the surface, Michael is scowling under an umbrella. Isabel and her friend Stacie dip their toes into the water. It is not often that Isabel brings a friend home. He shoots Michael a warning glance. Of all of them, Isabel has the human thing down best. She has always been the brave one, the one to take chances, the one to blend in and shed her alien skin. Max envies that about his sister, but sometimes he worries what that might mean next year when she graduates. He can feel Isabel’s longing to leave Roswell. It tinges his thoughts with worry and sadness.
“Max?”
He shakes the water out of his ears. “Sorry, what?”
“Are you coming to the party tonight?” Isabel’s friend Stacie asks hopefully.
“Seniors only,” Isabel admonishes, shooting him a deadly look.
“Um no, I don’t think so. Michael and I have plans,” he lies.
“What kind of plans?” Isabel asks her eyebrow raised.
“Guy stuff,” Michael interrupts harshly. “We should get going soon,” he says pointedly.
“We are gonna die young eating this slop every day,” Michael says as Max pulls into a space in front of the Crashdown.
Liz is working today, but something is different. Maybe it is the way she moves from table to table, or the way she doesn’t notice him at all. Usually she says, “Hi, Max,” in that way that makes his stomach drop. Today, she seems distracted, and he is suddenly not very hungry at all.
He pretends to look at the menu, but instead he watches Liz stop at a table of football players. One of them, Kyle Valenti he thinks, says something and Liz blushes furiously. She doesn’t look like herself at all and bumps clumsily into one of the other waitresses.
Suddenly it dawns on him that Kyle Valenti is flirting with Liz. Jealousy shoots through him, and he definitely is not hungry anymore.
Still he orders his usual and tries not to look over at that table. His jealousy is irrational. Liz isn’t his girlfriend, not even his friend. She isn’t his anything. Maybe he has been hoping that she could be, but it will never happen. Not for the guy who doesn’t even belong on this planet anyway.
The football players filter out except for Kyle. As their order comes, he can’t help looking over. At that moment, Liz stops by Kyle’s table dressed in regular clothes instead of her waitress uniform and Kyle stands up. To his horror, Max realizes that they are going on a date.
“That guy is a tool,” Michael says nodding towards Kyle and Liz before taking a big bite of his burger.
Later that night, with Isabel gone, and his parents in Albuquerque, the house feels very lonely. He turns up the radio so loud that the music vibrates off his walls. He lies back in his bed his arms behind his head. The thing about music is that sometimes it can say the things that a person can’t. Certain lyrics often stick with him and rotate in his mind. He thinks he should write them down, maybe whip them out at the right time. Since most of the time, his own words came out all wrong.
The music is so loud at first he doesn’t hear the phone ring. He grabs the receiver just before the machine picks up.
Isabel slams the door to the jeep with a huff.
“What happened?” he asks, but Isabel ignores him.
He is about to turn the key in the ignition when he spots Liz dragging Kyle down the sidewalk.
For a moment, he hesitates. Should he help her? Kyle looks like a handful.
“What are you waiting for?” Isabel snaps.
He starts the car, his eyes on Liz. She has Kyle propped up against a car and is fishing around in his pockets.
It is wrong, so wrong to be jealous that Kyle was the one she was touching. He watches as she pulls out a set of keys and practically pushes Kyle into the passenger seat.
As he drives past, Liz is grimly pulling her hair into a ponytail.
August
If Earth was a perfect place, Liz Parker would be in the seat next to him. Kyle Valenti would cease to exist. The August night would sparkle with brighter stars. That unwavering teal luminosity that was Liz would envelop him, keep him steady, and block out the creature from outer space until it shriveled up and died.
Instead, it was an extremely imperfect world, and he was stuck at the Starlight drive-in with a petulant Michael, and his sister who was becoming increasingly distant. Liz was just a crush. Liz was just someone who sat next to him in biology, someone who he took notes for when she had the flu, knowing he would never have the guts to stop by and give them to her. Liz was just someone who was polite and said hello when he came into the Crashdown, someone who would never know how he felt, or see him the way he saw her. Tonight she was someone who was probably out with Kyle Valenti, who despite his lackluster personality could be a part of her life in all the ways that Max could not. It was frustrating and cosmically unfair.
He took a deep breath, shook away his thoughts, and reminded himself to stop thinking about Liz and the things he could not control or change. He turned his attention back to the movie but felt queasy. The boy in the movie did not want this power. His life would be simpler without it, but the dead didn’t care, they just kept coming, expecting things from him. It made him different, a freak, someone who wasn’t even a part of the world around him. Was it that much different from being able to bring almost dead things back to life, or being able to walk into people’s dreams, or rearranging the molecular structures of objects?
“Identify much,” Isabel whispered sarcastically as he shifted in his seat. They had shared thoughts before, not in an extraterrestrial way. Just that Isabel knew him better than anyone else. He ignored her comment but could not help hoping that maybe the distance he was feeling from her wasn’t as wide as he’d feared.
On the way home, the rush of air through the jeep felt good on his skin. He drove in silence and let Isabel turn the radio up until the music was vibrating off the floorboards.
“Let’s make a stop, I’m starving,” Michael said thumping the back of his seat as he stopped at the light a block from the Crashdown.
“Michael, they close in half an hour,” Isabel said. “You ate a ton of junk already.”
“And now I want a piece of pie,” Michael said belligerently.
Michael had been on edge most of the summer. He wanted to pick apart every last bit of Roswell in his quest to find the ship. Max was certain it had either been destroyed or was locked up in some government facility way out of their reach. Why keep looking for something they would never find? If they did, what were they going to do with it anyway? Fly back home? They didn’t even know where home was. As far as he was concerned home was right here in Roswell. It was different for Michael though. Michael couldn’t stop dreaming of something better.
Max pulled into a spot reluctantly. “Great,” Isabel sighed.
Max was surprised to see Liz working. A ribbon of happiness fluttered through him. It meant that she hadn’t been with Kyle tonight. It must have been a long shift, there was a stain on her teal uniform, her ponytail was undone, and her antennae were crooked. He watched, oblivious to Michael and Isabel arguing next to him as Liz picked up a broom and disappeared through the swinging door between the kitchen and the main room. When she was gone, he realized that he had been caught.
The waitress with the short blonde hair was watching him curiously a pen poised over the pad in her hand. She looked over her shoulder at the door Liz had gone through and then headed towards their table.