Summary: Liz did what she came to do; she went back into the past and saved Zan. But Zan is nothing if not dangerous, and every action he makes creates a ripple effect that will change the world Liz knew beyond all recognition. It's a new timeline, but does that really mean it will be a better one?

Disclaimer: I do not own Liz Parker, Zan, or any of the other characters of the TV show (and book series) Roswell.

AN: Updates for this story WILL be erratic, and I may be making some changes in the first story in order to accommodate some ideas I had for this story later on. Any changes I make will be minor, though, and when/if I make them I'll do it when I post a new chapter and that chapter's authors note will tell you what changed and in what chapter of the first story.

Also, I apologize. It's like three in the morning and I'm not super coherent.

Pairings, for the moment, are undecided (although I'm leaning towards certain ones). That means if you want a pairing and can make a good enough argument, I'll consider adding it to the story. Also, forgive me if the Isabel/Alex stuff seems stiff - I'll try to avoid it, but it's not my favorite pairing so I might have some problems writing it.

Enjoy. (:

Ava drove the whole night through, going so fast it was really a miracle that she didn't hit anything or attract the attention of the local five-oh. She was still driving long after the urgent, scary pulsing of her connection with Zan had morphed into an intense, confusing grief. She pushed it aside before it could drag her down too and put the accelerator to the floor, picking up dust along the deserted desert highway.

She wondered what it'd be like to see him again. She couldn't stop thinking about it. Of course, that was nothing new; ever since she'd watched Rath shove him under that truck, he'd been the only thing she'd spent any time thinking about.

She'd stayed up at night wondering what he'd been thinking about in that last moment, as he'd watched the head-lights coming at him. Had he known that it was Rath and Lonnie who'd done it to him? Had he thought she'd been involved? Had he blamed her, hated her… had he felt totally alone? Or had he just stared, mind blank with shock as he watched his death approaching?

She'd hoped he had been in shock. She'd hoped he wouldn't have had enough time to think it through and realize none of his crew had called out or stepped up to help him. She'd prayed he hadn't had even a moment to see just how completely he'd been betrayed.

Now… she knew he'd figured it out. He'd had months to think about that moment, after all. And she could tell he thought she was involved in what happened to him; why else would he his mind be so closed off from hers? Even if he had no idea about this connection between them – which made sense, since she hadn't known about it either – she knew enough about how the mind worked to know that if he trusted her, that door would've stayed open. So, obviously, he at least suspected she'd had something to do with his 'death'.

But now that he was alive, she had a whole new string of questions. Where had he been all this time? What was he doing in New Mexico? Who had him now – and why? Was he okay – really okay? Did he remember everything, was he healing, was he the same person he'd been before? And how the hell did he survive?

Despite the control she'd maintained all night, Ava felt her eyes welling up. That mental image… Zan on the ground, broken and bleeding and hurt, and the three of them just… just running away.

If Ava had thought for even a second that there was any possibility that that truck hadn't killed him, she never would have left him there. She would've even jumped the coop early and escaped Lonnie and Rath if she'd had to; she would've searched for him for as long as it would've taken to find out the truth. But she'd seen that truck hit. She'd heard the impact, watched the gore fly, listened to the people screaming… There was no way he could've survived.

Or so she'd thought.

She wasn't stupid; she knew even then that she never should've gone with them after what they'd done. Hell – the right thing to do would've been for her to grow a pair and make the assholes pay for how they'd betrayed Zan. But she wasn't strong like that, and she'd been too afraid of facing this alien planet alone to even try.

In fact, the only thing that had finally given her the guts to walk away had been meeting Liz and the others and realizing that something crucial had changed. She wasn't sure if it had happened when Lonnie and Rath had killed Zan, or slowly as they'd grown up on the streets of Earth, or the very moment they'd died the first time around, but no matter what Lonnie said, Ava wasn't the fucking Queen of Antar anymore.

She was a girl who'd grown up stealing, eating out of trash cans, dodging authority figures and kissing the asses of her peers, partying and occasionally having underage sex with strange and sometimes very sketchy guys. She didn't have a famous name, or a royal bloodline dictating who she could talk to or what she could do. She didn't have – and most importantly, hadn't ever had – a husband in Zan. He was just a boy she'd grown up with, a boy she'd known completely and loved with her whole heart in a way the Ava of Antar had never really known or loved her husband.

Ava wasn't that woman anymore.

And she didn't even want to be that woman.

From there, it hadn't taken long for her to realize that Lonnie and Rath weren't her family – weren't even her friends – and that she was in more danger with them then she could ever be alone. She'd struck out on her own, totally ready to face a new life on Earth, to make a home.

But she'd only done that because she thought – she'd known – that Zan was dead.

Ava clenched her hands on the steering wheel until the knuckles of her hands went white. She kept following his trail well into the morning, which is when she began to realize that Zan was moving.

She tugged at the thin rope of their connection, feeling that same well of grief from the small crack in the door between them. She pushed at it gently, trying to get a look inside, but he'd gotten control of his mind again and the door wouldn't budge. If she hadn't gotten her foot in during that attack, she had a feeling she wouldn't even be able to find him at all anymore.

Ava swallowed and bit her lip, trying not to take that thought personally. It was ridiculous – judging by the lack of response from his end, she doubted he had any idea she was there, so she doubted it was personal.

She kept going until almost noon, when a sudden, weird prickle danced up the back of her neck. She slowed the car down, looking around for the source of her unease. There was nothing around her but grassland and fences.

Her eye caught on something strange, and without giving herself time to really think it through she pulled to a stop and stepped out of the car. She glanced both ways, but she didn't see any houses or people or anything anywhere.

For several hours now, she'd been driving along besides a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. But up ahead there was a break in the metal mesh – a place where the thick wire looked to have bubbled outward, opening a semi-circle breach some five feet in radius. As if it had been… blown open.

There was something wrong with this – something familiar. Something… alien. She could feel it raising the hair along the back of her neck, making goose pimples rise up on her arms. She knew this energy, knew how it felt and what it looked like when people used it without subtlety.

And Zan had been here not that long ago.

Ava put the car in park and got out, glancing around to make sure there wasn't anybody else around. She made her way over to the gap in the fencing, staring at the melted edges of the metal and the black scorching of the grass. Somebody… somebody was trying to get out from inside the fence. Somebody alien, who'd been in enough of a hurry not to make something smaller or clean up after themselves. They'd just let off a burst of energy to open the way, and…

Ava frowned. The energy wasn't Zan's.

When she was standing just inside the warped circle of metal, Ava slowly leaned down until her hand lay flat on the grass.

Zan was half running with, half carrying a short, familiar brunette toward the fence. She lifted a hand, face averted, and the metal twisted and warped –

They hit the fence line in a matter of seconds, Zan shoving the woman through before ducking through behind. They took off towards a dark shape in the road, a van –

Ava gasped, pulling her hand from the grass and tearing up.

"Oh, god." She whispered. She'd known he was alive – had felt it inside of her mind – but to see him, even for a second... "He was here. He was safe, he was escap –"

An arm wrapped around her waist, a hand coming up to wrap around her mouth. Ava tried to scream, tried to buck free, but whoever had a hold of her was strong and he wasn't giving way. Ava kicked back, hitting something solid, and the guy behind her groaned and shook her sharply.

Where the hell did this guy come from…?!

She struggled harder, trying to think of a way to get free without giving away what she was. She clawed at his hands, kicked some more, but it wasn't getting her anywhere. She was just starting to consider using her abilities when the guy turned, taking her with him until she was facing off to the side, where a giant slab of the grass had risen up to show a concrete room.

Somebody walked out of the room toward Ava, flanked on either side by half a dozen random looking people. Ava gasped behind the muffling grip of her captor and felt the blood drain from her face.

Ava stared, cursing her luck that this little reunion had to come now of all times.

"Yo." Lonnie smiled, blood oozing down her face from a bloodied, purple lump on her temple. "Long time no see, lil' sis."

She whimpered and squeezed her eyes shut, reaching out towards that doorway…

Zan! She cried desperately.

But the door didn't so much as shake.

A slender hand reached up to Ava's temple and the world went black.

Zan brought his thumb up to dig into his temple, hoping to use the pressure to fight off his pending headache. It didn't work, but there wasn't much else he was willing to do right now; he was in the vent of Jennifer Coleman's dorm, waiting for the stupid blonde chick to leave so he could pick through her stupid friggin mail, and if nothing else the pain should keep him awake.

He didn't get why this had to happen; Beth had mentioned Tess's shed in one of her Journals and had even talked about its defenses and what exactly they'd found in there. But what she hadn't included was – surprise, surprise – the friggin address. Which meant if he was going to go through with his plan of stealing as many of Tess's advantages as he possibly could before they even knew he was still alive… he was going to have to do a little B&E.

Not a problem, obviously; nothing he hadn't done before. Except that, well… he hadn't. At least, not in a friggin college dormitory, where there was a fucking security system to get in and a couple dozen night owls who could've spotted him creeping around and staking out the place. To be honest, it probably didn't matter much if anyone saw him, considering there was a shit load of people coming and going here all the time, but on the off chance Tess realized her shit was missing before he got around to getting himself ready for her, he needed to make sure nobody could finger him as the one responsible.

Unfortunately, that meant waiting for the unexpectedly early bird Coleman to finish her cereal, get off her fucking ass and get out of his goddamn way.

But apparently, she liked her daytime television.

Zan's back throbbed, and with a wince he shifted, knee hitting the aluminum wall across from him. He froze, but the blonde chick didn't so much as move.

Zan scowled, feeling his all too familiar temper catching up to him. He was pretty damn sure Beth would've told him to calm down and be patient or whatever, but this was friggin ridiculous. If he waited in this fucking vent any longer he'd have to start eating the bugs to keep from starving. As it was, he wasn't sure his back would ever friggin unbend.

Coleman moved, and Zan felt his hope begin to grow, thinking any moment she was going to get up and head towards that door of hers and go –… well, any goddamn place, really.

She leaned forward, watching the screen intently, and settled again.

With a muffled scream, Zan pushed his fists against his eyes and willed away the desire to brutally murder the college student. She'd deserve it. Girl was paying, what, a couple grand a semester to sit there and stare at a TV? She should be in a fucking library, studying her stupid ass off! What the hell was wrong with kids these days?

Zan noticed the hypocrisy of this and promptly ignored it.

Deciding that enough was enough, Zan put his hand against the wall and, searching for the familiar buzz of electricity, he followed the lines of it and…

The room went dark, the television shutting off with a cheerful click.

"… Are you kidding me? Come on, really?" Coleman gaped, grasped her hair and threw herself back into the couch. "They were just about to show who took Sonny's kid!"

Zan watched, caught somewhere between disgust with her dramatics and sadistic satisfaction for having caused her some fraction of the annoyance she'd caused him. After a few minutes of pouting, she made her way to the bathroom and emerged – twenty minutes later – dressed and carrying a purse. Zan groaned gratefully and almost cheered as she left.

With a quick mental twitch, he locked the door behind her. Pushing the vent cover free and using a little of his abilities to widen the gap, he slid into her room and immediately made for the table of papers he'd noticed a couple hours earlier.

He sorted through it quickly and – after he'd found a little envelope with all the needed information – made a little tour around her room. He didn't expect much out of it (he really doubted she had any idea what she'd been dragged into), which is why he was so surprised when he found a picture of her and Ava in a flimsy plastic picture album by her bed.

Oh – obviously it wasn't Ava; Zan couldn't have gotten her into a getup that straight-laced if he'd paid her. But the very fact that her face was so familiar was enough to tell Zan he was looking at the infamous Tess Harding. That was about all he could tell about the picture at a glance; they were sitting at a table talking about something – recently, judging by the how old they looked in the photo – and they didn't even seem to realize the camera was there.

He pulled the photo out of the plastic casing and checked the back, hoping to find a date or maybe the location where they'd been. It probably wouldn't have mattered much anyway; if he was reading these stories about her right, she didn't strike him as the type to go to insane lengths to get what she wanted. If he had to guess, he'd figure this Coleman chick was just an easy target; she went to the right school and - judging by the phone call he'd overheard earlier - her dad was the Dean here. Tess'd probably met Coleman when she was getting Alex enrolled so he could use the computer thingie and just decided to take advantage of it.

Somebody wiggled the doorknob and, finding it locked, muttered a curse. Zan groaned and hurried toward the vent, shoving the album in his back pocket and pulling himself up into the narrow opening as quickly and quietly as he could.

The wall had only barely reformed when Coleman's roommate – a significantly less pretty blonde girl – made her way into the room and hit the light switch. Zan started making his way out of the vents, way beyond ready to be done with the whole fucking thing.

Behind him, he heard the roommate's perplexed mutter. "What the hell happened to the lights?"

The trailer… was not what Zan was expecting.

For one thing, even though he was huddling in the sage-brush a hundred feet from the thing, he could see through the windows that there was a lot of stuff in there; Beth said it was pretty much empty when she'd gotten there. Which meant either Tess would be moving it all at some point in the future, or somebody else would get there between now and the time Beth had gone there originally and clean out the place. If it was the former, then there was a reason – if it was the latter… well, Zan wasn't sure what that would mean, other than it tickled his sadistic side to imagine the big bad alien Queen getting her secret stash secretly stolen while she was in Roswell playing the goody-goody girlfriend.

Unfortunately, that didn't look real likely, considering. There were machines floating through the air in circles around the trailer - and the faint vibration of the molecules felt both crystalline and living. Far as Zan knew, that pretty much had to be Antarian, which meant it was probably those flying security bomb things Beth had described (and named, though of course he couldn't remember the name anymore), only…

Well, there were six of them.

"Awesome." Zan whispered irritably.

Yeah. She probably hadn't been robbed. In fact, if she owned this much shit and had six of those bomb things at her disposal to protect it all, Zan figured it must say something important that she had moved it all – including most of the security – at some point between now and when Beth had found it. The Journal has said the only things in there had been the crystal navigational... thingy and the translated papers…

So, basically, only the shit Tess had needed to get them headed off to Antar.

Zan scowled down at the little trailer, wishing he has some basic idea how those friggin bombs worked. He knew a little something about security systems, considering he'd had to bypass a few of them in his younger days, and the problem with security systems was that some of them wouldn't just alert the cops if you got in without the password – they'd send a signal if you cut the wire to them, too. Zan wasn't sure if these bombs worked like that, but there was still a possibility that if he set them off, not only would he risk blowing his ass up, but he'd risk warning Tess somebody was going after her stuff.

Still, Zan couldn't just back off of this. He needed those papers and he needed that crystal so that if Tess ever went totally postal and realized she didn't have to be friends with the other three of the Roswell Four to force them into the Granolith and back to Antar, she wouldn't be able to. Plus, who knew what else could be in that place that might be important?

Not to mention, all this B&E was making his inner klepto twitchy.

Sitting there, sweating his ass off in the sage-brush in the middle of the friggin desert, Zan's planning quickly lost momentum. His mind drifted back to his childhood, when he'd spent a cold afternoon hanging with his crew in this department store. He'd wandered away from the others and started watching cartoons - he thought of it now because there had been one he'd been completely enraptured with, about a road runner and an idiot dog in the desert. Or, no - not a dog, a coyote, who for some dumb ass reason always thought he could catch the road runner by doing stupid shit like dropping anvils off cliffs and -

Zan blinked.

Without letting himself hope too much, Zan looked back at the trailer – which, unlike what he'd been half expecting, was flat against the ground.

He spent a few more minutes carefully tracking the bombs, making sure they kept circling the house without ever going inside. When he was certain, he grinned.

Time to pull a Wile E. Coyote.

Max wouldn't even look at her stomach anymore.

Liz hadn't noticed at first, because she'd been avoiding it herself, but lately it'd been pretty obvious. He used to take every opportunity to drag his fingers from her belly button to her heart, and the one time she'd asked why, he'd just said that he loved her soft skin and the way her heartbeat felt against his hands.

No longer, though. He caressed her waist, her arms, her neck, her back, and even her ribs, but he wouldn't go anywhere near her scar.

He wrapped his arms around her and drew circles on her back with the hand that wasn't holding her cheek. Liz watched his face for a moment, noting the stubble and the shadows under his eyes, and then she pulled his hand between them and laid it flat against the raised white line left behind from when he'd cut his healing of her short to try and save their child.

He visibly tensed, then tried to hide it. She could still feel it thrumming through his arms and chest though. She pressed her palm over the hand on her stomach and put the other on his chest. His heart was pounding.

"Max," she whispered, thumb tracing patterns on the back of his hand. "It's okay."

He looked at her, eyes dark with exhaustion and regret. "No, it's not."

Liz shook her head minutely, already seeing him pull away. "Max -"

"Liz." Max cut her off, pulling his hand from her stomach and sitting up. His head and shoulders drooped, his hair and the darkness in the room working together to hide his face from her. "This is my fault. Kivar only attacked because of who
we are - Micheal, Isabel and me. If it hadn't been for me... Liz, it's because of who I was that our child is dead."

Liz flinched. She'd been wondering for a long time whether or not she was ready to talk about this with him, and she was... but that didn't mean it didn't hurt to hear it put so bluntly. They'd had a list of names picked out, but that had mostly been a formality - Max had been jokingly holding out for the name 'Kal El', which Liz figured Micheal had put him up to.

In the end, Liz was pretty sure they would've named him Alex.

"Max," Liz said after a moment, chest squeezing. "Kivar was always going to invade. Even if you hadn't been Zan, if you'd been some normal human guy... We would still be in the middle of a war between planets. Our child would have been at risk no matter what we did or who you were. We knew that going in to this."

She paused and waited for Max to say something, but he was silent. She sighed and continued. "And that's ignoring the fact that if you hadn't been who you are, I never would've survived long enough to get pregnant. Or are you forgetting I belong to the 'I got shot by a trucker' club?"

That, at least, got a response. Max turned and glanced at her, and for the first time she caught a glimpse of the tears in his eyes. She bit her lip against the familiar twinge of grief. He'd spent most of her pregnancy visibly uncomfortable with the idea; it had only been in that last month, when he'd felt their son kick for the first time, that he'd really begun to feel like a father.

Liz sat up and wrapped herself around him from behind, laying her cheek on his shoulder and hugging him tightly. She got teary too, then.

"You would've made a really amazing dad." She whispered with a trembling smile. Max shuddered, and then turned and took her in his arms.

Liz blinked, sunlight hitting her face and chasing away the dream. She swallowed past the ache lodged in her throat and rolled onto her back, hand reaching up to absently rub at a stretch of skin on her stomach. It still stung there, although she was already beginning to forget exactly why.

She didn't notice the tears on her face until her concerned mother came up and demanded to know what could've possibly happened so early in the morning.

"I..." She muttered, then shrugged and smiled. "I was dreaming."

AN: Review.