Spoilers: ARCC... takes place right after it.
Summary: Michael and Isabel have a real moment. :)
Disclaimer: Metz, Katims, WB! Metz, Katims, WB! All together now.
"Goodnight, Michael. Merry Christmas," Maria bade him softly. Michael just
smiled cryptically in response before turning away from her front door and
making his way back through the town of Roswell. He allowed himself to
stroll slowly down the streets of his hometown, as he usually did when the
late hour of night offered him its particular form of solitary comfort. As
expected, his thoughts began to place themselves in random, only
half-remembered order as he walked, making him feel like he was thinking
everything over at once and yet never really catching the phrases and
images. Walking always did that. . . gave him the comfort of not thinking
about anything and the security of thinking about everything all at the same
time. He found himself standing at the foot of the giant Christmas tree
that stood more or less in the center of the park where he had just attended
midnight service. Looking thoughtfully at it, the thought struck Michael
that it might look better if only. . .
Michael furrowed his brow in concentration before passing his hand in a sweeping motion over the tree – or rather, the image of the whole tree from his one-eye-closed perspective – and gave it a nice dusting of snow. He stepped back from it a bit, admiring his handiwork and glancing surreptitiously to make sure nobody had seen him. Nobody had, and Michael grinned, then jumped nearly a foot in the air as the snow he had placed on the tree disappeared as quickly as it had come.
"It looked fine the way it was, Michael."
Michael’s eyes widened as he crept slowly around the perimeter of the tree to peer at the vacated seats for the service, and saw nobody. That was weird, he could have sworn he had just heard Isabel. . .
As soon as the thought entered his mind, he saw her. Glimpses of red hat and scarf through the staggered rows of seats. He walked over to stand behind her, looking down into her upturned face.
"Hey."
"Hey."
A long pause ensued, during which a silent war was waged, the two teens waiting to see whose curiosity would get the better of them first. It was a comfortable habit, a little game that they hadn’t played with each other in. . . what must have been weeks, but felt more like years. Michael spared a smile for the memory of how it had become their game alone, how Max had never had any taste for battles of will, and how he let his curiosity get the better of him too eye-rollingly soon for Michael and Isabel. Michael chuckled silently and seated himself by Isabel’s prone form, on the chair next to her head.
"Okay, I’ll bite. . . what are you doing here?" he queried with a twinkle in his eye as he took in the ridiculous picture of Isabel lying on her back on a row of seats. It seemed so. . . undignified. She managed to rectify that by raising one eyebrow imperiously. How the hell did she do that? If this whole impromptu auditorium were full of people, she would be able to make them all feel foolish for sitting up with that one movement.
"I could ask you the same thing," she replied guardedly, fixing her eyes on the clear night sky, and Michael’s smile fell a notch. "But I won’t." He scowled.
"What’s the matter with you?" he shot back acerbically, mentally trying to figure out what was bugging her. With the success of Christmas 2000, she should have been grinning from ear to ear and sipping egg nog with her parents at home, not lying out of sight on a bunch of chairs in the park, acting like someone just killed her puppy.
"Nothing’s the matter. It’s Christmas." She explained, as if that had made anything clearer than a tar pit. Michael nodded knowingly, pretending to know what she was talking about, watching the game turn into sort of a dance that he and Isabel only knew the steps to.
"The pageant was great." She paused, tilting her head to the side and looking at his face for the first time since he had approached her. He was careful not to look back at her.
"It was," she conceded, the statement ringing with overtones of a question. Michael began to chew on his lower lip; she believed that, so that wasn’t the problem. He waited for Isabel to pick it up. It was her turn.
"It was," she whispered to the night. Michael’s eyebrows shot up. That wasn’t supposed to happen. . . she should have made an open-ended statement that he could respond cryptically to. Hmmm. When in doubt, review step one.
"Some trick Max pulled yesterday." Isabel visibly stiffened, her entire body tensing up as if for an attack that wouldn’t come. Okay, he’d hit a nerve there.
"Yeah. Some trick," she spat out the last word as if it left a bad taste in her mouth. Screw the rules, Michael thought. He needed to backtrack a little.
"Nice tree. Your work?" A safer route.
"Yup. Well. . . sort of. My plan, anyway." Isabel’s eyes darted to his face and back to the sky again. "So. . . I take it Maria liked her present." There, that was the proper Isabel response. Some of the tension in Michael’s frame eased.
"Oh, yeah. She liked them," he informed her in an ominous tone. Isabel smirked.
"Well, score another one for the Christmas Nazi." Michael’s eyes flew to her face, but found nothing there to read. Uh-oh.
"C’mon, Iz, you’ve known about that nickname forever," he half-pleaded, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. He wondered why she had let them know that she knew about that nickname this year. . . it’s true, she had always known about that. She just never seemed to care until now. The blonde sighed distractedly.
"Forget about the stupid nickname, Michael." She folded her arms across her chest as if she were suddenly cold.
"Hey, don’t get pissed off at me, Iz –"
"You know I don’t care about that name, Michael. I love making Christmas, I love the pageants and songs and decorations, I. . . just didn’t think it really pissed people off, that’s all." Michael could have laughed out loud if she weren’t so serious about it.
"Isabel."
She jerked in surprise, looking up into his face, into his eyes. They never looked at each other when they did this. . . whatever it was. Non-communicative sharing thing. However, the way he said her name. . . it held so many things. Out of the millions of times he’d said her name over the years, sometimes dozens of times every day, he’d never said it like that. It was gentle and tender, and yet strong and almost forceful. The word seemed to have a weight to it, like if she reached out her hand, she could catch it falling from his lips and hold it there like a small stone, warming it in her palm. His eyes held hers, something they rarely did, and Isabel was a little shaken by it.
"What?" She almost winced at the sound of her voice. She hadn’t meant for it to come out sounding so. . . helpless. Michael just held out his hand. Isabel looked at it for a long moment before sighing and gripping it, using him to help pull her to a full sitting position beside him. She leaned over, bracing her elbows on her knees, not meeting his eyes again. He mimicked her position, craning his neck to try to peer through the wisps of her curled hair to see her face.
"What is it?"
Isabel became aware of her hands, trembling slightly in front of her, and she clasped them together tightly to stop their movement. Slowly, she turned her head to the side to meet Michael’s gaze once again, their bodies perfect mirror images of one another. She wanted to tell him how she felt, she did. . . but it seemed as though her mind was teeming with thoughts, all jumbled up and crashing into one another, moving too quickly for her to hold in her mouth. So she did the only thing she knew would explain it to him.
Slowly, so slowly, she moved her hand up to his face, her fingertips hovering over his eyes. As if from an unheard instruction, Michael shut them. She let her fingers touch his forehead and let her mind flow into his.
Michael knew that he would never be able to explain the sensation if asked to. For the moment, he was Isabel, and Isabel was he. There would never be a human term, never be a human language that held a word to describe how Isabel felt. He felt her in every way: he felt what she felt, he felt what it was to be Isabel, he felt Isabel from Isabel’s perspective and his own, he felt her with all his senses and all her senses, he felt her ten different ways multiplied by another lifetime of joys and sorrows, by infinite time and space. He felt and immediately understood her need for her humanity, her need to make these ultimately human days and years and celebrations and rituals mean something. He felt her reluctance to someday leave these all behind for memories, and her reluctance to open up to anyone about the thing that made her other, that made her alien, something that should have been a memory and wasn’t. He felt her need to give feeling shape and substance, to package and decorate and name her love and her heart in the only way she knew how. He felt her emotional walls, felt the panic and the fear that kept them in place, and felt the loneliness and the longing that they created in her.
When she was gone from inside of him, he felt torn in two. Hollow and yet utterly filled. He wanted to give her the same thing that she had given him, a part of herself, a tiny fragment of her soul that he could tuck away in a part of his mind and his heart that would only be remembered in that delicate moment between sleep and awake. He cursed his inability to do so.
Michael let two tears escape unchecked from his eyes as he drew Isabel in close for a hug. Whatever they had been, whatever they were at that moment, whatever they would be in the future didn’t matter. Friends, siblings, soulmates, lovers, strangers, spouses, destiny. . . in that moment, just being was enough. They clung to one another like people who were drowning, fighting that same inner battle to keep their feelings inside, that constant daily struggle of walking the line between sharing enough and sharing too much.
They remembered rolling their eyes at Max’s childish impatience, once upon a time. Lying in different beds, in different homes, and crying for a person that was lost to them, a person they never even got to know. They remembered feeling the same way, on different ends of the spectrum, always.
"Thank you." It was whispered in tandem, two confessions becoming one in the cool, dark night.
Isabel stood, placing a fond kiss on top of Michael’s unruly hair before slipping away to home and family.
Michael sat perfectly still for a long moment before looking thoughtfully at the row of chairs sprawling out beside him. After another moment, he stretched out on them, looking up at the stars. He thought about home and family. He thought about friendship and love.
And he thought about the things that fall just short of definition.