The Choice
By Nicole Hazel

Disclaimer:  I don’t own any of the characters.  Just borrowing them.  :)
Category:  Michael and Maria
Rating:  PG
Summery:  Future Maria is offered an opportunity to change the past.
Warning:  Spoilers to Surprise.  References to The End of the World.

 

The desert -- April 2015

The moon is full over head of me, and there is a different quality to the air as I crouch on the desert sands.  The sand at my feet seems rather the dust of life.  I let it slide between my fingers.  I feel my life slipping away from me -- but that statement isn't entirely accurate.  The truth of it requires much more of an explanation.  I tell this story without really knowing whom I'm telling it to, yet I feel the story must be told.  It begins in the desert, only a few short hours ago.


Though my body was just as slight as it had been when I was younger, it felt heavier, weighed down by years of tragedies and hardships, the most recent of which being the reason I had come to this remote part of the desert in the first place, just west of the interstate.  A car passed by in the distance.  Going south on 285.  Memories flickered on the edges of my mind, but I didn’t let them come into focus.  I stood instead and watched it disappear from sight.  The stars twinkled cheerfully overhead of me in the crystalline black sky.  I stared up at them with somber eyes.  I wanted to shout at that moment, to scream or cry, but I remained silent.  A tear trickled down my cheek.

Would you change it?  The question popped into my head suddenly.  It did not seem to be my own thought.  My thoughts, in fact, were stilled for a moment, and my body tensed as I absorbed the meaning of the question.

Would you change it? the question returned.  Yes, was my first, instinctual response.

Are you sure? the voice -- for I knew then that it couldn't be my own thought -- asked me.  My eyes flickered to the fresh pile of sand behind me.  From the desert he came and to the desert he shall return.  The simple phrase I had just recited as I completed the burial of the last of my friends came into my head.  Yes, I'm sure, I responded.

There is a brief pause, and I felt something rip.  All the light seemed to rush into one point before my eyes, and I felt a rough jarring like the sensation one gets after stepping off a moving walkway onto solid ground.

Go then,  the voice commanded me, but I couldn't respond.  The light was too harsh, and I had to shield my eyes from the glare.  Gradually, though, the pain subsided.  I opened my eyes.

I looked around.  I was in the same spot in the desert -- at least I assumed I was.  But the plants around me looked slightly different, and when I looked behind me there was no fresh grave.  The sun was high in the sky; it was sometime around noon.  I supposed that I should wonder how I came to be here, yet I knew instinctively that a simple answer to that question didn't exist, so I pushed the thought from my mind.

Would I change it? the voice had asked.  Now I can.


When I arrived at the small town that had been my home as long as I could remember, I still didn't know exactly when I was, as strange as that might sound.  I walked slowly through the streets.  I wondered briefly at being recognized, before I realized that even the physical changes in me were enough that people would not connect me to my younger self.  People had a habit of seeing what they wanted to, I knew.  No one would connect the woman I am now -- my solemn eyes having long since lost their sparkle of youth and innocence -- to the girl I had been.  My blonde hair hung low on my back, and my loose blouse did a little at least to hide my unusually slender frame.  No, I wouldn't be recognized.

Someone bumped my shoulder from behind, and for a moment my breath caught in my throat.  I didn't have to look up to know who had jarred me so, but I did anyway.  A man with wild brown hair that stuck up like a porcupine was walking away, a dark-haired man at his side.  I stared after him for a moment.  Three months, I thought.  It had been three months since I last saw him alive.  They disappeared inside the Crashdown.  The Crashdown Cafe.  I think of it as it is now -- in my time.  The restaurant is dark, and the windows are boarded up.  The Parkers hadn't stuck around long after their only daughter died.  Too many painful memories.

I gathered my nerve and stepped through the door.  The normalcy of it all was a shock to my senses.  Jose was in the back calling out orders that were up.  A girl in a waitress uniform with straight, dark hair hovered over a booth taking an order.  Liz.  I caught sight of another waitress -- a girl with short blond hair -- out of the corner of my eyes, and I quickly averted my gaze.  Of them all, my younger self would be most likely to recognize me.

Using my long hair as a shield, I slouched down in the most remote booth I could find.  I was still reeling from the shock of it all, and a cold chill had come over me as I began to recognize what day it was.  September 18, 1999.  The day of the shooting.

Would you change it? the voice had asked me.

Yes.

Go then.

The voice -- the mysterious being -- wanted me to stop that key, life-altering event.  Stop the gun from being fired.  Stop Max from saving Liz.  Stop the truth from coming out.  Oh, it would be so easy.  I scanned the restaurant, and I could already see the men who started it all.  "The guy with the gun was kind of like a, like a muscular Beavis.  And...the other one was like a, like a beefy Butthead," a young voice echoed in my head at the sight of the two.  I could reclaim the innocence of the girl who had spoken those words.

I moved my foot -- just a little.  I almost stood.  Thoughts of strategy flashed through my mind, but something made me stop.  No, someone.  While my mind had been racing with visions of how to take the gun away from the man, my eyes had been wondering.  And it was no surprise where they landed.  Michael.  The name stopped me.  As hard as I tried, I couldn't stop the images.  The look in Michael's face as he looked at me from across the hall as I found the napkin holder in my locker.  The feel of his lips on my forehead as he pulled me to him.  The subtle twinkle in his eye as he teased me.  The heat of his kisses.  The look of love and sorrow on his face as he died in my arms.

I squeezed my eyes shut.  When I opened them again I focused instead on Max, thinking it safer.  It wasn't.  Max and Liz.  How could I deny them their life together -- as short and tragic as it may be?

Would you change it? the voice asked again.

No.


The tearing again.  But I expected it this time.  The shapes and colors all merged into one point.  This time, the darkness didn't leave me.

I had expected to be dropped back off in the desert where I had come from.  I had refused the offer, after all.  I wouldn't change it.  I could have erased all the pain in my life, but that would have meant erasing the joy and love as well.  And I couldn't bring myself to give that up, no matter what the price.

But despite my refusal, my journey was not yet complete.  I sensed a question from the being.  He/she/it wanted to know what went wrong in our struggle, what key event could be changed to make it all okay.  I pondered this.  No one thing went wrong really -- rather it was everything.  But the biggest was when Tess left.  Later, we weren't strong enough -- the aliens weren't strong enough -- without her.  One by one we fell.  First Isabel.  Then two weeks later Michael was killed.  Then Alex, Kyle, and Liz were taken hostage and never seen from again.  The last victim was Max, just yesterday.  No, I corrected myself, I was the last victim.  My friends had all died around me, and I had no illusions about my own chances of survival.  The being's probing tentacles in my mind reminded me that I had digressed from its original question.

I tried, but I couldn't think of any one thing that had gone wrong.  My mind kept going back to if Tess had been there, but even that had been a gradual process, inevitable really.  I saw now that none of us really had really welcomed her into the group as openly as she had deserved.  Max, her destined husband, had grown to care for her, but never in the way that she had once expected – not the way he loved Liz.

I sensed puzzlement from the being.  And something else.  What had gone wrong wasn't for me to change.  But if not me, I had to ask, then who?  I was the only one left.  I felt the answer, but I wasn't allowed to see it.  The connection between us broke as I felt another tug of time-shifting and I was jerked from the in-between place.

We -- or rather I, but I had begun to think of the being as there with me -- were in the caves.  I recognized the tattered pods on the wall of the rocky room.  There was someone else in the room with me.  Isabel.  She was wearing an elegant red dress, but it was dirty and torn.  I vaguely recognized it as the dress she had worn to her eighteenth birthday party years ago, but I couldn't be sure.  Her hair was equally done up and equally in ruin.  There was a mixture of pain and anger in her tear-filled eyes.  She picked up a rock and flung it as hard as she could.  It hit the opposite wall with a resounding crack.  Isabel sank to her knees and sobbed.  I moved slightly toward her.  Shouldn't I go to her? I thought.

No, came the quick answer, though I hadn't expected one.  I was only to observe, I was told.

What had been, the voice said.  The darkness came again.

It was the same scene as before.  Isabel once more picked up the rock and hurled it through the air, but this time it was different.  The trajectory of the rock had changed.  Instead of bouncing harmlessly off the wall, it smashed into the lower pod a few feet away . . . and kept going.  The rock had gone through the pod.  The look of surprise and puzzlement on Isabel's face mirrored my own.  She crawled through the hole the rock had made, and stood on the other side at the foot of a great glowing machine.

"The granilith," she whispered.

History had been changed.

As I watched Isabel's awe at her discovery -- invisible to her -- I saw other things as well.  Flashes of what would come.  Max as I knew him -- had known him, I corrected myself -- stood on the balcony of Liz's bedroom, his long dark hair pulled back from his face, his dark eyes haunted.  On the balcony of seventeen-year-old Liz's bedroom, I saw as Liz’s face appeared in the window.  Only then did I understand.  It's not for you to change.  Only Max could.

As I watched the dual stories being unfolded -- Max using the granilith to change the past as I had tried to do and Isabel standing in wonder at the newly discovered granilith – I began to feel different.  It wasn’t painful, and when I realized what was happening, it wasn’t even scary.

I found myself back in the desert night again where I had started.  The strange feeling hadn’t disappeared, but then I hadn’t expected it to.


I tell you – whoever you are – this story now at lightning speed.  I have to.  I only have a few moments left.  The strange feeling is getting stronger.  I feel light, airy.  I look down at my hands; they have a transparent quality now.  Soon I will no longer exist . . .


Billions of miles away, on a planet yet to be discovered by earth, a woman – or rather the female of the species – pulled a visor from her eyes, breaking the connection between her and the distant, primitive planet.  She had worked for years to form an adequate connection between her and her children, but when it was finally established, she found that it was too late.  Both of her children as well as their spouses and all – save one – of their friends had already been killed by the enemy.  She had worked harder, reaching across space to the young woman with the aid of the stolen green crystals.  They now lay in her hands, their once brilliant glow fading by the second like dying embers of a fire.  A moment later, they turned to ash and blew away.

As she watched the ash spread through the air and disappear from sight, she whispered, “it is done,” and sent out one final prayer to her children, her hope for the future.

The End


Please send comments or questions to NicoleHazel416@hotmail.com. I love hearing what you think.

Return Home