FanFic - Michael/Maria

"Desert Ice"

Part 4 by chrysophyta

Disclaimer: I have only borrowed the Roswell characters for this story. I returned them safely and tucked them into their beds. They are the property of Jason Katims and the WB, etc. No infringement intended. Only extraneous characters are mine. Summary: Isabel has a secret, and Maria discovers a new threat. Category: Michael/Maria Rating: PG-13 Authors Note: This takes place after "Destiny" and started as a what if question. for Ailis

One summer, before the fourth grade, Maria went with Liz and her family to Carlsbad Caverns. Liz kept chirping about the stalagmites and stalactites although Maria could never keep them straight. Some rhyme: tight against the ceiling or the might of the ground. Even now she couldn’t remember. Liz went on and on about the chemical reaction between the water and the rock; the cave slowly melting over thousands of years. Maria remembered feeling the cave press her to the ground. The slick, wet, jagged spires close in on her like an iron maiden. It was as if she were mummified. Maria felt like that now, and she struggled to awake. When she opened her eyes, she blinked at a concrete wall. She was relieved to discover that she was not buried in a cave, but she didn’t know exactly where she was or how she got there. She knew three things: she lay in a cot; she was still wearing her uniform; and her body felt as though she had lost some big fight. And then she remembered. She had. "I hate my life," Maria groaned. She tried to sit up in order to determine where she wasn’t bruised only to discover that she wasn’t alone. Tess was leaning against the wall, staring at Maria. And something was wrong with her legs. They were twisted. Unnaturally. Maria was thirsty, and her throat was dry. "What are you doing here?" "I've been here for awhile," Tess said. "They took me." Maria looked around the room. It looked like a fall-out shelter: concrete walls and a steel door with no knob. One bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling and cast long shadows into the corner of the room. Why was it that bad guys always seemed to have a secret room to stash prisoners, Maria wondered. Was it part of the introductory package when you signed up? The bad guy starter kit. "Who's they?" Maria’s legs seemed to be working so she set them on the floor. Her knees were grass stained green and her shins had dried blood and dirt embedded into the scrapes. "Let me guess, you don’t know. I didn't sign up for this. I was fine, just tra-la-la-ing through my little life. Max didn't save me. I'm just the friend." Maria licked her finger and rubbed the dried blood off of her shins. "Let’s take stock of the situation. Michael, who wasn’t Michael, I guess, although maybe he’s been not Michael all along." She didn’t want to think about that part. She continued, "That doesn’t matter. He took me and Isabel. But Max was there so he has probably already found Liz and mobilized the troops." Although, she thought, when was the last time Max mobilized anything. He was probably practicing his patented wait and see approach. "So I guess that means we should try to figure a way out of this." That had been her best attempt at a go-team-inspirational speech, and Tess just stared at her blankly. Maria lay back down. Going back to sleep was the best remedy. If she closed her eyes, maybe she’d wake up back in her bed, and then she’d cut down on the night shifts at the Crashdown. If Maria lay still, if she didn’t move, Michael and Max and Liz would come. "Do you at least know what they want? Because I'll give it to them, no problem." After Max had been taken, Maria knew that this was an inevitability. It had only been a matter of time before men in suits would come again. Part of her had always been expecting it. Maria had tried to imagine what she would do in this situation. Liz had never told Maria what they’d done to Max. She didn’t want to know. She wondered how long could she last? What would be her breaking point? Maria suspected that she would crumble easily, and she’d eventually betray them. Maria listened to the insistent buzzing of the light bulb. She could hear Liz’s voice explaining, "Well, actually, the filament is made up a tungsten wire wound in a tight coil. It becomes white hot which is what generates the light." A soothing, rational explanation. She needed one of those right now. Maria could hear her heart beating. Fast, scared, echoing. It reminded her of "The Tell Tale Heart." She had read it in the ninth grade. The heart kept beating under the floor boards and drove the guy crazy. Of course, he was already crazy, obsessing over his boss’s eyes. The man had screamed, "It’s the beating of his black, sick, heart!" The story gave Maria the creeps. And so did her own heart. It reminded her how scared she was. And Tess kept staring at her with those goony eyes. A lot of good her superpowers were here. Max would fix Tess’s legs up in no time, and then they’d both get out of here. Maria started to talk: "Did you ever notice Michael’s rings? Probably not, since he’s not Max. I think about them a lot. They show just a little bit of his vanity. He acts all, ‘I don’t comb my hair,’ ‘I wear the same shirt,’ but those rings give him away. He really thinks he’s cool." Maria imagined his hands. The ring on his index finger, one on his ring finger. The glint of silver in the sun. The way he shoved them into his pockets and shuffled down the hallway. She remembered the way his had brushed her away, propelled her through the air, as if she’d been a fly, so insignificant that she didn’t even warrant a flourish. What if the Michael of the other night—-or the night before, how long had she even been here?--had been Michael all along? She swallowed thickly. She was hungry. Her stomach sucked against her spine. The last thing she’d had to eat had been the Buck Rogers 25th Century Chicken Fingers at the Crashdown. She wondered what the nutritional value would be ofthe ketchup and hamburger stains on her uniform. She sucked on the edge of her collar. She grimaced: salty fabric. "I like to think about him buying a ring, walking into Out of This World with all those trendy, hipster hemp clothes and looking through the glass case. He’d try some rings on, hold his hand up." She held her hands up in front of her. "Fingers out, watching the light reflect off of the band. "And sometimes I like to think of him pounding out the silver." Maria turned towards Tess, as though they were sharing secrets at a slumber party. "You know, one of those ping hammers hitting the metal over and over again. It’s hot and there’s one of those circulating fans with silver streamers in the center. Although I can’t quite picture Michael signing up at Galaxy Arts for a metalurgy class. Although maybe that’s where he goes instead of school." "He can change molecular structures," Tess snapped. "So it could’ve been a plastic ring out of a cereal box. You should really keep up with this stuff." "All I see is Michael break stuff," Maria grumbled. And throw people across rooms. And lawns. She got up; she had to move. She concentrated on moving her legs and not about that smile in the window. "We should be friends," Maria said. "We have a lot in common. Single parent home. You’re in love with Max who looks at his cherry coke with more affection, and I’m in love with Michael who—" she couldn’t finish. "We just should be friends," she added quietly. She looked around the room. There wasn’t even an air vent through which she could crawl to make her daring escape. "What do you know about your dad?" Tess asked. She seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness, sweat shimmering on her forehead. "My dad?" Maria sat down on the edge of the cot and rocked back into the dip of the canvas. She could remember very little about her dad. Except that he was gone. Her memory of him was that of shadows and shifting light, the vibration of footsteps on the stairs. Her mother liked to tell the story about the night Maria was born. She’d tell it to anyone. Friends, customers, complete strangers. And though Maria’s cheeks reddened in embarrassment, she liked to hear it. "We lived in a tiny, third floor apartment, on the west side of town," she’d begin. "It was the middle of summer, with no air conditioning." Maria knew her father was there, but he was always missing from the story. "The doctor says, in a calm voice," her mother said, imitating the doctor’s Chinese accent, "‘Mrs. DeLuca, your child may expire.’ ‘Well, do something!’ ‘You may expire also.’ ‘Do it quickly, then.’" That always made Maria laugh even though her mom must’ve been scared. Her mother would then touch Maria’s cheek and say, "You may have surprised me, but you were always wanted. Remember that," as though her mother remembered that the night may have ended very differently. Maria dragged her finger across the concrete floor. It was cold and hard and dirty. "When do you think they’ll come for us?" Maria was already thinking of the abduction story she’d tell Liz. She’d leave out the part about sucking on her uniform. "They’re coming now," Tess said. The door opened. Men in white suits walked through. Maria was about to say, "I meant Michael and Max," but only got out, "I meant" before a hypodermic needle plunged into her arm. She actually felt relieved that the matter had been taken out of her hands. Maria and Alex had gone to the "They’re Among Us" alien film festival last fall; so as Maria blinked slowly at her surroundings, she marveled at how accurate the movies had been. A bright, austere room. She half expected men to be wearing silver foil suits. The grey walls seemed illuminated from within. Except it looked surprisingly similar to her dentist, Dr. Shembab’s, office. In fact, she seemed to be laying in a baby blue dentist’s chair. She hated the dentist. A buzzing sound, like a Jacob’s Ladder, surrounded her. This was where Liz would say that a Jacob’s Ladder was simply the movement of electrons up two conductors. Surgical masked men hovered by the wall. And there was an open door. She could escape, except she couldn’t move. She was bound across her forehead and chest and her hands and feet were strapped down. Tubes wound round her arm then out of her line of vision. Tubes full of blood. Hers, she assumed. Although this didn’t alarm her. It seemed very logical that she’d be strapped to her dentist’s chair. Her father was standing in the doorway. Which was strange because she rarely dreamed about him. He was standing next to a lipless man. Her father was wearing a postal uniform, complete with peaked hat. Except he had on brown loafers with tassles. She stared at the tassles. She had to bite back a laugh. The lipless man was shouting something at her father. He said nothing, but he was getting angrier with each moment. She’d seen that look before. She must’ve been six, and she’d been digging in the yard with Mr. Jeepers, her stuffed dalmation her mom had given her when the real dog had grown too big to carry around. She’d been digging with a spoon, making separate, neat piles around her. Her father had barreled out of the house with that same look on his face. He had yanked her up by the arm and Mr. Jeepers had tumbled face down into the hole. She had cried then. She cried now. She wasn’t dreaming. She pulled at the restraints. The hard leather cut her skin. He turned sharply towards her. He looked at her as though she were to blame for everything. Maybe she was to blame. If she had stayed behind with Liz. If she had only gone on to Spanish class and learned irregular verbs. Isabel wouldn’t have told her. She wouldn’t have seen Michael. The contingencies seemed to roll back. If she hadn’t been. If she weren’t. Maria blubbered and the more she tried to stop, the more she hiccuped and sniveled. Which caught the attention of the lipless man. He wheeled a stool closer to her. He spoke slowly and clearly, just like Dr. Shembab, right before he told her she had a filling or needed some drilling done. It was the voice that broke painful news. Her uniform was plastered to her skin, as though a slick coat of fear covered her body. "You don’t have to worry," he said. "Oh, I can see you are. He is here, now. Our plans for you have changed." His face was pock marked, as though someone had taken a pin and pricked him over and over again. "You’re quite lovely," he told her. Her father stood stock still in the doorway. She stared at the tassles. "What about Isabel?" "She’s lovely, too," he said. He held up a plastic bag, filled with blood. Opaque red. Her blood. She would be brave, she decided. Just because no one knew where she was and her father was wearing tassled loafers, and this man had no lips, was no reason to panic. The lipless man unbuckled the restraints on her forehead and wrists. He wagged his finger at her. "You be good." She turned to look fully at her father. He was turned away. The lipless man’s cold fingers pressed against her arm and pulled out the needles out, suddenly relieving a great pressure. He pressed a cotton ball into her elbow and folded her arms up. She kept them there and rotated her wrists. "What will you do with her?" Maria asked. "I don’t understand," he said, wheeling away with the bag of blood. One wheel squeaked and wobbled. He turned away from Maria, and she heard the suction and hiss of a refrigerator door being opened and close. "Your whole alien thing," Maria said. "Tests, blood, cutting, torture." "We don’t want Isabel," he said. He rolled to the other side of the room. "But—" she sputtered. She closed her eyes. She was missing something. "But, Tess, she—" Maria had assumed that she was an after thought. Some bargaining chip. Why would they want her? "By the way, how’s your mother? We all thought she was charming. So full of life." The lipless man said it so casually. Not even with a tinge of regret to imply that the next sentence was, "It’s a shame we’ll have to kill her." Maria hadn’t thought she’d reach her breaking point so soon. Or so easily. It only took one mention of her mother. She struggled against the restraints. Blood seeped through her socks. "Please. She doesn’t know anything. Just--please." She heard a deep voice from somewhere behind her: "Completely human." "You’ve been the topic of debate for quite some time," the lipless man said. "Scientists bandied around theories. You see, our chemistries are very different. But your father was always a bit of a rebel. He wasn’t supposed to get involved. But your mother, she was very appealing." She tried to listen to every word the man said. This was important, but it wasn’t making sense to her. "My father is an alien," Maria said, surprisingly calm. This, she thought, is what it means to go into shock. She felt light, as though she would float off of the chair at any moment. "We were very excited about you. But then he dropped off the face of the Earth, so to speak." The lipless man stopped to appreciate his own joke with a breathy laugh. "This was a drastic measure. We needed him. We had to go through you. A nice family reunion, though, I think." His hands were doing something outside of her vision. She heard the clink of metal on glass. "We were rather surprised to find you with the others. Right in front of our noses." At that moment, Tess walked through the door with Nasedo. Tess walked. "You really should try and keep up," Tess said and smiled. And suddenly Michael was walking through the door. And in his wake, Tess and the lipless man flew through the air, fell dead against the wall. He leaned over her and unbound her. She pulled against the ankle straps. It was okay, now. Michael was here, and she would follow him out. He grabbed her hand and pulled her up. And just as he folded his arms around her, he was gone. She was still in the chair, the restraints secure. "Clever trick, don’t you think?" the lipless man said. "Although just between you and me, it’s as difficult as you might think to make people see what they want to see." Maria concentrated on breathing, although it was becoming increasingly difficult. The line between dream and reality had slipped away. This is what it meant to be crazy. She whimpered. "We’re very excited to see how things turn out for you." The lipless man patted her arm. Maria would have to join one of those Abductees Anonymous groups, now. Although she would have trouble saying, "They took me to my dentist’s office. And my dad was there, and he was a mailman. And Tess was there." Like some modern day Dorothy. Except Maria’s dog had been dead ten years. "And as much as I’d like to just put you in a glass room to observe your change, he seems to become very uncooperative when we suggest it." The lipless man pointed to her father. Maria waited for him to say something, anything. To tell her that he was sorry for leaving. "What change? Into what?" "Don’t worry," he said. "We’ll be back for you. And to find you, we just have to look for your boyfriend." "I wouldn’t go—It’s not like—" she stammered. "He’s not my boyfriend." He jabbed Maria in the shoulder with a needle. "But, dad," she said but was unconscious before she could finish.

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