Disclaimer: Me no own.

Distribution: Courtney and whoever else wants it.

Summary: This is an ambitious fic for me, and I can't make any promises on how quickly it will be done. One of the Aliens who piloted the crashed spacecraft returns to Roswell to protect his human family. Maria/Michael, Max/Liz, Isabel/Alex (though this fic is not romantically centered).

Notes: I'm making up a lot of stuff here, and it has no real basis on the show. **Special Terms: 'Fold': The Alien race; 'All': The collective conciousness of the Fold; 'Hunters': Fold 'police' sent by the All to monitor Fold behavior on Earth and enforce Fold codes of conduct; 'Amsar': The Alien home planet.

***

He rode into Roswell in a blue Ford Escort with stolen New Mexico plates, his brain burning, his eyes wide and unfocused. He knew every inch of this place, this cosmic dump site in the desert. Roswell. One of several American towns bearing the name, but more famous because of its infamy. Aliens. UFO crashes. Scrappy homegrown marketing ventures based on plastic little green men and fake autopsy videos. To this man, it was a graveyard, illuminated by neon and the distant lights of Area 51's aircraft hangar. Legitimate military activity: helicopters, fighter jets, one or two ragged Cessnas.

And underneath the hangar, pieces of a ship that had crashed almost fifty years ago. But it was meaningless to the Earthbound. It didn't make sense. It was incomprehensible. No controls, no seats, nothing resembling a life pod or stasis chamber, no engine, no landing gear. A shell. Worthless, but secret still.

This man had deeper secrets than the craft he had once piloted. Deeper secrets than the young who had gestated in that same craft and emerged cloaked in human flesh and caught up in it still. He envied them. At least they lived human lives, even if underneath they were still connected to the All. His secret was his destination. 5667 Vista Drive. His wife. His child. The only family he had left. He had run away a coward. He had returned with a determination to teach his human issue the power of heritage, of blood, so that when the Hunters came for his child, as he knew they would, the child would be ready.

The streets were quiet, he drove slowly, taking it all in. The Crashdown, the High School, the Post Office. He used to buy stamps there, mail packages...remembrances of a time when he had almost reached normalcy, when he thought perhaps this could work, that he could be happy. Then word had come from one of the others. Hunters, following his trail. So he had gone without a word, heading north into Canada then down South into Mississippi.

He hadn't felt them in months, almost a year. It meant nothing. They were trapped here, same as the others. They had nothing else to do with their exile but track, seek, destroy, track, seek, destroy. The blood must be kept pure. All those who disobey are to be eliminated, whereupon they would return to the All and face punishment. The All knew where their lost ones had landed. They were curious about this world, tacked on to the outer arm of an outer galaxy. The stellar equivalent of a foreign immersion program. They wouldn't be coming for them any time soon.

"Fuck you," he whispered, tired to his very marrow of hiding. Sooner or later the Hunters too would find the secret at 5667 Vista. He had to do something. It occured to him that by the time he reached the All that he would be barely recognizeable as one of the Fold. He was a man now, turning human in his heart. Soon he would be like the children in the crash, inmeshed in almost believing that the All had been but a dream. Almost. This planet was wild, magnificent and humbling. Not like the structured blue plains of Amsar, with its sparkling megaliths and astrophysic-designed houses. The Earthbound were viciously intelligent and agressively unaware.

They liked their aliens either far away or getting their otherwordly asses kicked soundly in summer blockbusters. They would not believe it until they saw it. But in Roswell, it was all around them.

He passed a stately two-story. The Evans house. The staccato hum of the two adopted Fold children tickled his spine. Aliens can sense their own kind. Further on down, a left on Ventura. The Desert Cactus Trailer Park. The pulse of a third child struck him in the neck, but he drove on. The fourth seemed absent, at least for the moment.

Down Gila, a right on Cielo. Through two traffic lights. Vista Drive. He parked down the street from the house and walked to the front door. Doorbell or a simple knock? He closed his eyes, stretched his conciousness out through the darkened windows, into the darkened rooms. They slept. He searched for his child's Alien rhythm. There. Almost undetectable from the steady rasp of the running dishwasher in the kitchen he and his wife had tiled. He doubted that any of the crash children had picked up on it, it was so light. It might be mistaken for a rustle of leaves, for the distant bass of a stereo, the crackle of electrical current through wires, the strange aural disturbance of a muted television. He felt it because he strained for it. Everything seemed more solid now, less tenuous. There could be no doubting it; his child retained the strength of the Fold.

Had the child ever, he wondered, opened a door without touching it? Cracked dishware when angry? Slivered a mirror when caught up in teenaged self-hatred? Had these things been dismissed, put aside, forgotten?

He knocked. Softly at first. He sensed it; they slept on. Harder then, and harder, until he was banging his fist against the buckling white-painted wood and the hall light came on, trapping him in its yellow glare.

The door swung open. There she was, his lovely wife, in that same silly blue bathrobe with the sheep on it. She looked at him, then staggered back, a low keening slipping from her throat.

"Mom?" A new voice. Every muscle in his body tensed. He hadn't seen his baby in nearly sixteen years. "Mom, who is it?"

And there she was, standing just behind her mother, beautiful in her almost-womanhood and so innocent, so just-out-of-bed off-guard that he almost began to weep that instant.

"Marcos." Amy's voice was shrill, confused. "Marcos."

His daughter's eyes were as wide as saucers. She knew his name. She'd written it a thousand times on a thousand sheets of paper.

"Hello, Amy." He smiled at his daughter, his fey, golden daughter. "Hello Maria. I missed you."

****

Encryption Sequence Initiated

Wave 39928222: Patsy Cline, 'Walking After Midnight'

Hunter Identification: 8665/**, alias Robert Warren

Tick Report: Case File *99*-02 (H'miaa Se'Ava, alias Marcos DeLuca)

Batch Number: 671/8*48 (November 28, 1999 - Terran Standard Calendar)

Transmission Origin: Marathon, Texas (Stellar Orientation VX2-12/CF-81,'Milky Way' Spiral Galaxy, Planet Terra)

Attention: Special Endevours Council - Terran Project

Language: English (Terran Germanic/Latinate, Dialect #4858)

Message Begins 8:43 pm, PCT (*&$$&*^, Amsar Time)

To the Council, let it be known that I and Hunter 9271/** (alias Vernon Elliot) detected the presence of alias Marcos DeLuca in Marathon Area, as well as aliases Maxwell Evans, Isabel Evans, Michael Guerin, in and around November 7, Terran standard.

Let it be known that aliases Evans, Evans and Guerin are known to reside in Roswell 18 (alias Fallen Star), North America. Exact locations are on file. No investigation currently underway regarding aliases Evans, Evans and Guerin. Let it be known that alias Marco DeLuca is under investigation for violating Code 299, Blood Mixing with Native, and issue is suspected. Previous investigative records on file. Alias DeLuca is thought to be heading west on the continent, evidence in confiscated personal belongings indicating San Francisco (alias Juniper). Tracking underway.

Request Directive.

Message Ends 9:12 pm, PCT (*&$$^&, Amsar Time)

*******

Encryption Sequence Initiated

Wave 772883: Dave Matthews Band, 'Spoon'

Tranmission Origin: Il'Haza (Stellar Orientation LKU-82/MX-53, 'Kalleb'Eliptical Galaxy, Planet Amsar)

Sender: Special Endevours Council - Terran Project

Re: Case File *99*-02 (H'miaa Se'Ava, alias Marcos DeLuca)

Request Processed: Locate alias Marcos DeLuca and suspected human affilaites, including possibile hybrid issue. Transport to Station F8452 -alias Fallen Star location. Contact Terran Project and await further instructions.

Priority Two Addendum: Locate aliases Max Evans, Isabel Evans and Michael Guerin. Transport to Station F8452 - alias Fallen Star. Contact Terran Council and await further instructions.

Use of force approved for alias Marcos DeLuca and suspected human affiliates, including possible human issue, only.

Thank you.

Tranmission Terminated.

Return to Regular Programming.

****

They sat at the dinner table, the cheap chandlier the only illumination. Amy and his little Maria staring at him, emotions rising and falling like storm winds. They had questions, more questions than had answers, but there was hardly a word spoken. Marcos felt the minutes tick by, rubbing him raw, exposing him like carrion. Say something, say something. Throw something at me. A table maybe, a potted plant. Anything.

"You," Maria choked on her own voice. Her mind was contracted, unsure of what the right reaction might be. She had thought of her father as a dream man, a hero, an oil magnate with a toothy grin. Not this handsome but humble man, looking so dogged she couldn't even bring herself to ask him why he had left, what she might have done wrong.

"How dare you." Amy's voice was laced with hurt, but Marcos knew his estranged wife well. She had rehearsed this speech in the event of his return. It was his duty to bear it. "How can you come back here after all this time? Do you want money, is that it? Well, you can have it. Take what you need. Just go away and stay away."

It had been foolish to think this was going to be simple, that somehow both Amy and Maria would understand without his telling it that he hadn't had a choice, that it had been for their protection. Even so, there was a part of him that agreed with Amy. How dare he? How dare he put her in this position, how dare he allow a hybrid child to be born, when he knew, yes he knew that such a thing was forbidden. But he had loved Amy and Maria beyond reason, beyond what the million voices of the All could allow. On Earth, he was a single mind, ripped away from the chorus of conciousness that had enveloped him. Cast adrift, he had found solace in Amy Denver, a peace that he thought he'd lost forever when the ship had gone down.

He had to tell them everything. He had to let them know about the Terran Project, what he was, and why the twin being that Maria embodied in her entirety was an unmentionable abomination in the eyes of the Fold, a crime for which no forgiveness or amnesty could be granted. Why they feared her. Why they would hunt her.

"There is something," he began, his eyes boring into his daughter's, so like his own, "that I couldn't tell you then. Something you may not be able to accept or even concieve of. But it is the truth, and I can prove it to you."

He shifted his gaze to the arrangement of plastic fruit in front of him. With little effort - it was like squeezing his thoughts into a fist - he made the ghastly centerpiece float, its waxy edges glowing pale silver. He made it turn around, as though on a rotating display shelf, as though to say 'look, no wires or pulleys'. Amy paled, gasping. She instinctively reached for her daughter, but Maria was wholly absorbed in the levitating apples and pears, her expression deep, hard to read. Not only shock, but something else. Something...clicking in her head, neural pathways ramming into one another, connections made and probabilities calculated. She had seen this before.

An image flared into his mind's eye: a young man, serious expression. Another young man, tall and suspicious, then smiling, inviting. A girl, beautiful, intimidating. The fruit toppled onto the tabletop, forgotten. Amy flinched, nearly screamed. Marcos was thunderstruck. She knew the Fold children, or at least the Roswell three. Briefly, his father-voice wondered which one was the smiling boy, Evans or Guerin? Then it hit him in totality. She knew. She knew. She knew.

"You recognize what I just did, don't you?" He tried to calm himself. His hands were shaking. He hid them under the table. "You know why I can do that, don't you Maria?"

Maria bit her lip, nodded.

Amy pulled away from her, suddenly feeling trapped. She always did resemble him. Their laughs had exactly the same cadence. Amy had been very careful to never hate her daughter for that. "What's going on?" Louder, panicked. "What is going on here?"

"I'm not from Earth, Amy. I'm from another place, far away from here. Another galaxy. I was in the alien ship that crashed here in 1947. I'm an alien. Don't turn away from me Amy, you saw what I did. You have to listen to me."

Amy stood up and began fluttered her hands, hyterical. "Maybe you're just telekinetic, like Carrie. Or something." And now the fury. "Or maybe you're just a goddamned liar who can't even come up with a halfway decent story to explain why he left his wife and daughter all alone in this shithole town!" Tears came, Amy didn't try to wipe them away. "You know what I do for a living? Make little aliens for tourists and wonder where my self-respect went. Then I remember. It went out the fucking door with you the day you left, you bastard! And now you show up in the middle of the goddamned night saying you're an alien...Jesus, an alien? Do you really think so little of me? There's no such thing as a fucking alien, only deadbeat husbands who..."

"Mom." Maria's voice was clear, steady, sweet. She probably sings like an angel, Marcos mused. "Sit down." She gestured to the chair Amy had vacated. Her mother stared at her, feeling betrayed, confused, furious. But she sat.

"I believe him." Maria took one of her mother's hands between her two delicate ones. "I believe him."

"You believe," Amy took a deep breath, "that your father is an alien?" Was she delusional? On drugs? Was this because of that Michael boy she had talked about? Did he put her up to this somehow? Marcos had always been too smart for Amy, too fast. Maybe he had gotten a hold of Maria earlier and brainwashed her into believing this patently impossible lie. The man she had known sixteen years ago would never have done such a thing. Then again, the man she had known sixteen years ago wouldn't have claimed to be from another planet, either.

"Yes, I do. Because...I know aliens do exist. They're here, in Roswell. I've seen them do things like what Fa...he did."

Amy's mouth opened in shock. "Who? Who is an alien? What the hell are you saying, Maria?"

"I can't tell you." Maria shook her head. "I promised." She turned to her long-awaited father with new eyes, eyes that pried inside of him for an explanation. "But even if you are what you say you are, that doesn't explain why you went away." Now she was eager, her youth obvious, hungry.

Marcos swallowed. "I left because of you, Maria."

His daughter froze, and he knew that she had misunderstood him. All her most buried fears, that his departure had been due to her, an unwanted baby, rose into her eyes, naked and begging for mercy.

He rushed to explain. "I knew that if the others found out about you, they'd try to take you away. So I left Roswell, hoping to divert their attention away from you. I made sure that I was enough of a problem to distract the Hunters for as long as possible, but now they're onto me again, and if they find you...I don't know what will happen. To any of us."

Amy was shaking her head. Maria's small smile of relief was replaced by one of perplexity. "But why would they want me? I'm just a high school kid, just regular, you know?"

Marcos suddenly wished he hadn't come here, that he didn't have to say this. But not coming had never really been an option, and saying it had always been inevitable. "Maria. You are not, by any definition, regular. Your father is an alien. Your mother is a human. That makes you a hybrid."

Maria's brows drew together. "So? I can't do any alien stuff, like lifting the fruit and heating up stuff with my hand."

"Can't you?" Marcos leaned forward and picked up one of the plastic pears, resting it in the palm of his outstretched hand. "Look at this pear, Maria. Do you see the wavy lines across it?"

"Wavy lines? What the hell are you talking about?" Amy had calmed down a bit, but just a bit. This concerned her daughter. She couldn't fly off the handle until she'd figured out what kind of game Marcos was playing.

"I see them." Maria shrugged, dismissive. "Dr. Dodd told me it was my astigmatism. The lines and stuff, I mean."

Marcos chuckled. She was so transparently earnest. It was like looking into a calm lake and seeing the bottom. "It's not your astigmatism. Those lines are force patterns, and every object that exists in space gives them off. Now, I want you to concentrate on the wavy lines."

She nodded, staring intently at the fake fruit.

"Are the edges of the wavy lines bending?"

"Yes. What does that mean?"

"It means," he was having trouble hlding in his elation, "that you've got a hold of the force pattern." His daughter was a Zenith, he could tell, not one of those strange, drooling hybrids the Terran Council rumor mill liked to advertise. "Now, make the wavy lines straighten."

For a moment, the pear lay on his palm, immobile. Then it shot jerkily in the air and hovered there, blazing a strange violet-silver.

"Holy shit!" Maria bolted out of her chair and the pear fell, rolling to the floor. "Holy...holy shit!"

"Holy shit." Amy put one hand over her racing heart and passed out cold.

****

Her father had tried to convince her not to go to school that morning, but she'd insisted. Her father. It was so strange. Maria manuevered her red Jetta through early morning traffic deftly, her mind lost to the routine of it. Her father had come home. Her father hadn't left because of her. Her father was an alien. She was half-alien. She could do the things that Max and Michael and Isabel could do, and her father had told that as a blend of human and Fold, as he called them, there were a few things she could do that they couldn't.

"Like what?" She'd demanded, feeling as though something secret and special was finally hers. "Show me."

She'd kept him up all night, practicing levitation, unlocking doors, reading auras, heating coffee with her hand like Isabel could do, and even a bit of dreamwalking, once Amy had given up and turned to a few sleeping pills to help her make it through the night. These powers that had once so frightened her needed no skill to be used, no practice to learn correctly. He told her how to do it, and she did it. She got the feeling that if she really wanted something, no matter what it was, she could make it happen just by thinking about it. Marcos had told her that wasn't so, and to be careful always of discovery.

"The Fold long ago mastered the art of pattern manipulation, which is what you did with the fruit. Because every member of the Fold on Amsar is part of the All, manipulating thought is impossible. But you, Maria, you're half-human. You can make people see things, believe things, say things. You can put them to sleep, make them jump over fences, as long as it's not too complicated. You can only suggest to the suggestible; you cannot force the resistant."

She was still reeling from it all. Only half-human, capable of low-intensity mind-control. And, almost the most unbelievable, a daughter with a father. She had watched his face intently when he explained things to her, seeing the resemblance between them, seeing how gentle and sad he was with her. He didn't have a limo or any money to speak of, but knowing what he sacrificed to keep her out of the Hunter's paths...

And that was another thing. She swung into a space in the high school's parking lot and pulled her carrier bag over one shoulder. Hunters. Did Max, Michael and Isabel know about them? Did they have any idea that the home that they wanted so desperately to return to had sent them here, to Earth, on purpose as part of what could only be termed a social experiment? Did they know about the Terran Project and that they had no intention of retrieving their three lost prodigals until they were satisfied with what they had learned here? She got out of the Volkswagen and shut the door behind her. Did they know that their home planet's name was Amsar?

The stars. She saw them on the inside of her eyelids, shining vivid on a sea of black. The bell rang. She opened her eyes. The fingers of her left hand were glowing the eerie violet-silver that Marcos said marked her as a hybrid. Quickly, she hid her hand under the desk as the other students filed out. When she pulled the hand back, it was as any normal hand should be. Michael walked by her, and she opened her mouth to tell him her secret, to hint at it. He ignored her, walked right past and out the door.

It stung, but not as acidly as it would have the day before. He didn't want to get close to her because he thought she would complicate his search for the truth. She almost laughed out loud.

Second and third period passed without incident. Her one transgression had been to 'persuade' Mr. Kalvin to curve the grades on the American History midterms. And really, that was only fair. The man was an absolute tyrant when it came to testing.

Lunchtime. She fairly skipped to the cafeteria. Marcos had told her that it would be all right to tell the three Fold children, as she was now calling them in her head, to replace their previous title of 'The ET Squad', and after she explained the situation between Liz and Max, he had agreed that she would probably not be in any extra danger if she knew about Maria. Tray in hand, she went outside to look for the others.

"Hey guys," she sat down between Liz and Alex. "What's up?"

"Did you see the meteor shower last night?" Liz popped a cheese cracker into her mouth. "Max and I went out into the desert to watch it. It was amazing."

"No," Maria slapped her forehead. "Damn, I forgot all about it."

"There was no way in hell I was going out there and getting all dirty in the desert for some stupid falling rocks." Isabel picked at her Caesar salad and smiled. "But my date with Colin Gray went very well, thank you."

Alex's smile faltered a bit at this piece of information, which Maria noticed, but he plastered his happy face back on a moment later. "I took photographs of it. The shower, I mean. 'The Beacon' wants to buy a few of them from me."

"For how much?" Michael upended a bottle of Tabasco Sauce over his mashed potatoes.

"Um, fifty a shot, I think the guy said. But they only want two or three pictures."

"Still, beats the hell out of nothing at all." Michael took a hearty bite of his potatoes and nearly gagged. "What is this?" He choaked, "mashed soap?"

"You know how seriously this school takes hygiene," Maria teased, then squealed as Michael sent a glob of the stuff sailing past her ear. "You jackass!"

He stuck out his tongue at her. God, she loved it when he loosened up.

"Did you guys read about the new exhibit opening up at the UFO Museum?" Max opened that day's newspaper to the Arts & Culture section and pointed to an article. "It going to be about different ideas on what aliens might have looked like, over the years."

"I can't believe that trash is in the Arts & Culture section," Isabel hissed. "That museum is a interstellar load of shit."

"Guys." Maria's voice was hestitant, lower than normal. Five faces turned towards her, expectant. "I have some, um, news."

"What is it?" Liz tucked a lock of shiny brown hair behind one ear. "Did you ace the History final? I heard Kalvin's curved it this semester. Can you believe that?"

"Well...um, actually I made a B. But that's not my news. Last night, someone came to my house last night around one. It...was my father." She held her breath, uncertain of their reactions to this.

"Your father?" Liz whispered. "Oh my God."

"Jesus," Michael muttered. Everyone else was silent.

"Well," Liz prodded gently. "Did he say why he left? Did he say where he's been all this time?"

This was going to be more difficult than she'd anticipated. What would Michael do when he found out that the home he wanted so badly didn't want him, that he was data, a statistic? That they wanted to kill her, that they thought she was a monster? What would any of them do then? Her heart was thumping so hard she was suprised that everyone outside couldn't hear it. "Yes, he...did. He said...he said that..."

The world exploded. Everything was awash in violet, and silver, and noise, in taste, in touch, in Michael, in Father, in Liz, in a planet galaxies away that could claim half of what she was. Her brain, unaccustomed to it's newfound breadth and range, sent out a distress call, a scream, a wail that hammered into Michael, Max and Isabel like a pickaxe digging for gold in a cave floor. Maria slid silently off the bench and onto the concrete patio, the part of her that was aware of what was happening broadcasting a command, a dictate to the other students: you do not see this, this is not happening, everything is fine, you do not see this. And they saw nothing.

But Max, Michael, Isabel, Liz and Alex saw it. They saw the small and lively blonde surrounded by silver-violet flames, and for the three Fold children, it carried with it a banner in bold: Alien. Alien. Alien. Maria's eyes rolled back in her head, her body began convulsing, and the three were slammed with images with an almost physical impact...Hunters, Marcos DeLuca, Maria lifting that first pear, Amy crying into her daughter's arms, and the words of Maria's father echoing through it all: "Alien, a hybrid, you are my daughter, I was the pilot, they are never coming back for us."

Max went down on his knees and gathered Maria in his arms, choosing not to wonder why no one seemed to notice what was going on. Isabel stood as though locked in place, eyes wide and unbelieving. Michael flanked Max on Maria's other side and smoothed the girl's hair back from her damp forehead. "What does this mean, Max?" he whispered.

"What does what mean?" Liz shook her head. She and Alex stood beside Isabel, utterly lost. Liz turned and called out for an ambulance, for someone to call a goddamn ambulance, but no one even turned to look at her.

"Don't bother," Michael ripped off the hem of his T shirt and mopped Maria's brow. "They don't even know you're there."

"What's happened to everyone?" Liz knelt behind Max and grasped his arm. "What the hell is going on, Max?"

"Don't you know?" Isabel asked quietly, her voice faltering. "I don't know how we missed it, or what the things I'm seeing from her mean, but she is one of us."

Michael closed his eyes and nodded. "Yes."

Max looked straight at Liz. "Yes."

****

Continued in Parts V-??

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