Unbreakable - A Beautiful Lie · (Roswell Fanfiction) · √

NINETY-EIGHT

I stared at him. I couldn't feel my legs anymore. Couldn't feel my arms. My heart must have stopped. My brain must have gone into hibernation.

I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Empty. I felt empty.

And I wanted this all to stop. I wanted the surprises to stop. I wanted the bombs of shock to stop exploding around me. I wanted to be happy again. Relaxed. Safe.

"She's the one I'm supposed to love." Max was spitting the words out as if they had a disgusting flavor.

"No one has ever talked about her," I said slowly, my voice as detached as my body. "No one. No one has ever hinted to her existence. Not in all of that time I spent at the hands of Steven Carter."

I shook my head, frowning. "I don't understand. It would be an excellent way to taunt me, to upset me, when I was in captivity. To really emphasize that the two of us could never be together. Why wouldn't they use that information?"

Max sighed. "I would presume that Sarge didn't want too many to know about her. That's why she's been kept a secret."

"Why is she such a secret?" I asked, feeling increasingly unimportant. Compared to this amazing Tess, who everyone was so adapt at keeping a secret, I was nothing.

"Stop that right now," Max said forcibly.

"Why, Max?" The first tear escaped my eye and tumbled down my pale cheek. "Why is she so protected?"

"Because she's crazy," Max replied.

That was not reason enough, according to me. But before I could protest against his lame explanation, Max filled in, "I mean, certifiable. She's actually insane. Even by alien standards."

I was getting more and more confused. Why would they set Max up with a lunatic?

"Remember the Institute where I was being held?"

I nodded mutely.

"Tess was there too." He paused to close the distance between our bodies and gently wrap his long fingers around my shivering upper arm. "She just never left."

A crazy alien?

What in the world had gone wrong with the Carter family?

For a brief moment I found myself wondering what Sean's mother was like before I refocused on the subject. "What's wrong with her?"

Max brought his free hand up to my face, hesitated for a second while reading my face to see if I were to protest. When I didn't, he fluttered his fingers over my flushed cheek and bent his face down to mine, close enough for me to feel the warmth of his breath against the line of my nose.

"She has absolutely no empathy."

I opened my mouth to protest and inform him that this seemed to be a common ailment amongst the Antarians - according to Max himself - but Max spread his fingers against my cheek to softly press his thumb against my lips, softly silencing my protest.

"The people who looked after her and tried to treat her at the Institute, believed her affliction to be a result of her special ability."

My mind searched for the new word Max had mentioned and with a wobbly questioning tone, I asked, "Dreamwalking?"

"Dreamwalking is just a small part of her special ability. It falls under her ability to make up things in her own head and project it into other people's minds and in that way affect what they are seeing. Apparently, she did it so much when she was a child that it broke her mind."