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

EIGHTY-ONE

"I'm so sorry," was the first thing Max said to me, before I even had my eyes fully open. "I pushed you too far. I should have noticed how your energy... God... I'm so sorry."

I tiredly blinked my eyes and tried to focus on his face looking down at me.

"What happened?" I mumbled tiredly, the letters rasping against my dry throat.

"I fucked up," he said tensely, no confusion to the magnitude of his self-hate as disgust made the corners of his mouth tremble in a grimace and anger blotched his cheeks red - in stark contrast with the whiteness of his face.

With a moan, my eyes fell shut. My whole body ached, but mostly my head. My head was pounding. As if someone had hit me over it with a considerably hard object.

"If you'll let me, I'll remove that for you," Max said. His words made no sense and through the fog of my headache I realized that he wasn't touching me. He felt really far away. I groaned while pushing myself up on my elbows, attempting to get closer to him.

At least my movement made him touch me, if only to gently pushed me back down, right as I was starting to feel dizzy. "No. Stay down."

I wet my lips. Slowly. Distractedly. Why was everything so dimmed? So unreachable? "What are you talking about, Max?"

I was too tired to even attempt to search through his thoughts. But I had the strongest horrible feeling that he was blocking himself from me.

"I won't heal you without your permission."

I made a feeble attempt at deciphering the detachment in his voice, before resigning with a tired sigh. "Don't be silly." What was he on about now? "When have you ever needed my permission?"

"I keep putting you in danger. I can't believe I just did that. I was careless - with you. That's... I can't even..." The sound level of his voice was rising and I felt it throb inhospitably through my overwhelming headache.

With my eyes closed, I used the little energy I had to blindly fold my arms around his neck and pull his talking mouth to mine.

"Shut up," I commanded weakly against his lips and used my lips to work around his resistance. I knew that he had nothing against kissing me. He just thought he didn't have the right to, all of the sudden.

He pulled back before we, in my opinion, were anywhere close to done, causing me to moan with a mixture of dissatisfaction and frustration, and rested his forehead against mine.

"I should have noticed too, you know," I said, the memory of the minutes just before I had passed out in front of everyone slowly coming back to me. "That I was getting tired."

He pulled back, breaking the skin contact between our foreheads, and my arms lost their grip on his neck. "But you weren't the one coming up with more and more stuff to do."

A cold shiver raced through me at his physical distance, emphasizing our emotional and mental separation. Through the dazed haze of my mind, only one thing had the power to make its way clearly through. Like a bright beacon in the night.

I had to, quickly, pull him out of his darkness.

I took a deep mental sigh in preparation, gathering my strength to focus on reaching him. My head throbbed painfully, my eyelids blinking slowly, while I give him a soft half-smile and tried to get him to see my point of view. "You were having fun. I loved how much fun you were having."

Obviously, my means of comfort fell flat as Max said darkly, "I can't have fun at the expense of your health."

I took a deep breath, my attempted smile dying on my lips. "Of course not. But you would have stopped if you had noticed, right?"