"What task?"

All five pairs of adult eyes turned to her. The sandy haired girl directed her question towards Tess, who had first mentioned the 'task.' "What did you mean when you said that your task had already been accomplished?"

Tess stayed silent at first, her eyes slits in her round face. After staring into Jo's open, innocent face, her silent loathing crumpled.

"We were wrong. Nasedo was wrong. Wrong about our destinies, wrong about what the future could and would hold. When we were created, our parents, our friends, really did intend for us to find each other again, so that we would never be alone. We didn't need to be together romantically to learn enough to help our people, but they didn't want us to learn it alone."

The petite alien began to pace back and forth. "Nasedo told us that our task, our duties had changed. The last message he received from our planet asked us to…to follow our human instincts. No pure strain of our race could ever exist again and the rest of our destiny had also been negated by the destruction of our real home."

The terrible reality of Tess's words wiped most of the hostility from Maria, Liz, and Alex's faces.

In a broken and whispery voice, Tess went on. "Nasedo told us to do as we wanted, to follow our human hearts. Our task was to integrate ourselves back into the human race; our people had died, but the humans didn't have to die. Our DNA would help humans evolve, change, adapt to the coming changes. Other aliens and our enemies shared a common goal - to eradicate all life not easily assimilated into their own. Someday, they'll find the humans, and our people asked us to help prevent that."

Her voice grew strong, angry. "I lost everything. The others, they had their pet humans, people to go back to, but they're all I have. My home was the only hope I had of having a real life. I hate this world, and now I'm expected to help continue it." Fat globules of tears fell from Tess' eyes, smearing her makeup.

"Oh, I really do feel your pain. After all, it's not like I've been a single mother for the last 15 years. Or that I've been gone to sleep every night terrified that men would come and take my daughter from me. I never woke up at 3am to check on my baby, counting her breaths until I was sure that she lived, that no one had murdered her, or taken her for questioning and dissection. Play the sympathy card with someone else, Tess, I couldn't care less." Maria vibrated with righteous fury and her temper lent her body stature.

"Maria…"

"No, Liz, don't. How can you defend them? They left us. Okay, fine, I can respect that choice. But I don't have to feel sorry for them. I don't have to accept them back into my life."

Just as Liz said, "I'm not defending anyone," a small voice muttered, "Well, what about our lives?"

Liz stopped speaking when she heard her best friend's daughter speak.

"What about us? If the rules have changed, if they aren't hunted by the bad aliens anymore, don't we get to decide if we want them in our lives?" Seth looked intently at his mother. The older woman tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, falling back into old habits. Her son looked almost exactly like his father, talked like him, and had the same annoying habit of asking unanswerable questions.

"Mom…" Jo cleared her throat and squirmed nervously in her seat. She wanted desperately to look at her father, at Michael, but didn't dare. She needed to see her father almost as much as she needed to protect her mother and the two needs were directly opposed to each other. If she looked at Michael, her mom would know that she wanted a dad. If she didn't, Michael would think she didn't.

"Fuck."

Oops. "Jo Joy De Luca, it's time for bed." Huh? Okay, so she'd cursed, but geesh! Things of intergalactic, not to mention family wide, importance were going down and her mom expected her to go to bed?

"You too Seth. The adults need to talk without the kids putting their two cents in." When Seth stubbornly stayed in his seat, confronting his mother's determined gaze with one of his own, Liz answered her son's questing eyes with soft words. "Honey, we're not going to decide your choices for you. We just need…we need to accept what's happened. Please?" The smooth faced young man rose, and held his hand out to his friend. Jo followed him, sneaking a glance back at her family, her extended not-entirely-human family.

She stopped at the hallway, facing the aliens. "You," her voice cracked and stumbled, "uh, you won't go away again, will you?"

"Nah, we're here for the duration." Michael watched his daughter, his child grin and almost skip out of the room.

And Liz, her body heavy with fatigue, watched her own child, handsome and too mature for his age, accompany Jo. Somehow, somehow she had to deal with this. After fifteen years of relative peace, aside from the occasional problem with Seth's spotty powers, Liz wasn't entirely sure she wanted to replace peace and quiet with chaos and shouting.

"Thanks Liz. Does this mean I can kill him now?"

Too late. Liz turned to Maria with a scowl on her face, ignoring the blonde's chipper question. Placing her elbows on her knees, she regarded the others in the room. Isabel, sitting stiffly in her wicker chair; Tess, staring down at the floor from her position near the room's entrance; Michael, openly staring at Maria; Alex and Maria, both waiting for Liz to say something as they glared at the aliens; and Max, leaning back into the smaller couch, perfectly calm.

He'd just discovered he had a son, painful things had happened to him over the last fifteen years, and he looked fine to Liz. As if nothing had happened, he just sat out the silence. Liz had a sudden irrational urge to slap the calm out of Max, to make him get angry, to find the sensitive, studious boy she'd fallen for years ago. Her Max had been replaced with a calm, serious, war tempered leader. His life since leaving Roswell had toughened him, made him so strong he vibrated with visible power.

This was not a man she knew. Perhaps, this wasn’t even a man she wanted to trust with her child, her friends, or her life.

Things really had changed.

"I don’t really know what to say, but it looks like I'm the only one calm enough to say anything."

"I'm calm, I'm totally calm."

"Maria, calm people don't threaten to kill other…people."

"You still can't say it! Liz, they are aliens. Aliens! Our children are half-alien." Maria snorted in disgust.

"Maria, stop it. We've gone down the argument road enough tonight." Alex's deeper voice cut in, preventing Liz from retorting. "So, you guys want something to do with our lives?"

Max replied. "Yes."

"Eloquently put. Right. I can't speak for Liz and Maria, but I'm pretty sure that the kids would like to know their dads, if only to get the lowdown on the alien stuff."

"Why don't we just agree to not shut anyone out? You guys can come over for dinner, take Jo and Seth out, do Dad stuff with them." Alex shot a deadly look at Maria, who snorted at 'Dad stuff.'

Liz took up the discussion, or argument, depending on how she looked at it. "We won't shut you out. Um, why don't you come back tomorrow, it's a school holiday and there'll be time to talk and figure things out."

Michael looked ready to switch from discussion into argument, but a simple touch of Max's hand stayed the urge. He looked away, biting his bottom lip.

"Tomorrow then?"

"Tomorrow."

The two former lovers shared a look, filled with fifteen years of missed history and a shadowy dose of the way they had once craved the other. Maria caught the look and groaned.

"Great, tomorrow. I'm going to bed. Liz?" The blonde waved at the doorway leading to the bedrooms.

"I'll be right up." Liz looked at Tess, barely meeting the blonde's eyes. "You're invited too." If Tess could help her son understand himself, Liz could accept Tess.

"Yeah, we'll come." Isabel spoke as she rose, almost stumbling towards the door.

The aliens and the humans went their separate ways for the moment. The irrevocable bonds between them had taken shape and lay upstairs. Like their fathers before them, Seth and Jo had a strange destiny to fulfill, but whether they ever would was as uncertain as their parent's had been. Fifteen years ago, Max Evans, Isabel Evans, and Michael Guerin had felt their destiny shatter inside them, killing their very human wants and needs. Driven by a fate they didn't understand and couldn't control, they left their home and fought a war for a planet they had never seen and never would. Now, they had returned to the people who had once helped them, and loved them, come back to their home and lives as humans, to finish their destiny.

As the adults and the children shaped by the destiny that had been mapped out fifteen years earlier went their ways into the night, they all wondered the same things. What would happen now, what had really changed, would anything ever be the same again.

As for Liz, the girl whose own destiny had so radically changed with the discharge of a gun, she remembered words written in her diary so long ago.