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

FIFTY-SIX

"In a way I'm happy that you at least have to practice to do all of that," I grumbled. "You already seem to have a very unfair advantage on humans."

He grimaced, as if he wasn't really happy about that unleveled playing field. "Definitely."

I frowned with the pause that followed Max's statement as I got the feeling that I had lost a loose end somewhere, something that Max had been starting to tell me when I had gotten distracted by the fact that he and his sister had shared a womb at the same time.

My mind manufactured an image of a three-year-old brown-haired boy putting his hand on the broken leg of his blonde sister and I caught onto that memory string and, "What does your healing have to do with the development of feelings?"

"Right," Max breathed and wrapped his leg around the back of mine - the hairs on his legs moving in a delicious teasing friction against my own smooth leg - as he rearranged his upper body, all the while keeping a close contact between our bodies. "Healing is very..." His voice trailed off as he got a far-away look in his eyes, a heaviness settling over his face. "Healing is very consuming. It demands a lot of energy, because you're not only repairing cells and rearranging molecules, you're also feeding energy into the cells to bring them back to life, in a way."

"Like kick-starting a battery," I suggested.

He blinked out of the dazed look and looked down at me. "Exactly." He moved his hand to my face, brushed fingers slowly over my eyebrow, my forehead, along the angle of my jaw bone. I could very clearly observe, though the bond, what he was thinking about. He was remembering putting my body back together. He was remembering the pain from my injuries, the cells melting from the heat, my skin breaking apart from erupting blisters.

My breathing turned laborious in my chest as I momentarily revisited that ordeal and this time also had to feel it through Max's experiences.

His own voice was strained as he continued, "It consumes your energy levels and your emotional levels."

I experienced, with relief and a touch of awe, how he manually pushed the memory of that horrible morning away, letting us both breathe easier again. But he had certainly made his point. Even though I would have believed him anyway.

"When you heal someone, you experience their pain from the injury and their emotional reaction to it," I stated. My mouth was dry and my heart was pounding against his chest.

"That's what a connection does," Max said, a touch of bitterness in his voice. "It would be a lot more efficient if I didn't have to feel all of that; I would be able to focus more on healing and less on trying to push away all the pain in order to concentrate."

I grimaced. Everyone knows how hard it is to concentrate on something when you are in pain.

"I don't feel it to the full degree like the person I'm healing is feeling though," Max admitted, "But it's enough."

"How many?" I whispered. How many had he healed? How many had he formed a connection to?

He hesitated, doing a quick count in his head. "Forty something? Probably."

That's a lot. I shivered. "Which means that you connect with a lot of different people, feel a lot different types of pain-"

He interrupted me by saying, "In a way; I've broken my legs four times, had several concussions, had two heart attacks, been shot three times, had my arm crushed underneath a car, been fatally burnt-" he looked at me with sadness and I knew that he was referring to me, "-fallen from the fourth floor, and..." He took a deep breath. "You get the point."

I nodded. Max had the power to heal; remove pain and save lives. But in return he had a lifetime of excruciating pain.

"Which makes it easier for you to understand people, understand what they are going through, their emotions and their feelings," I filled in, knowing what point he was trying to make.