FIC: Roswell New Mexico - Lost to Time 3/?
Summary: Time is not unchangeable if someone has the time, patience and drive to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself. Even if it means removing oneself from the equation.
TITLE: Legacies
RATING: R (for language)
CHARACTERS: Alex Manes, Kyle Valenti, Michael Guerin, Max Evans, Isobel Evans, Liz Ortecho, Maria DeLuca, Jim Valenti, Jesse Manes, Mimi DeLuca, Nora Truman, Eugene (Tripp) Manes
PAIRING: Alex/Michael
AUTHOR: Melanie
Summary: Time is not unchangeable if someone has the time, patience and drive to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself. Even if it means removing oneself from the equation..
DISCLAIMER: I own nothing.
FEEDBACK: Please?
Lost to Time 3/?
”I don’t like this plan at all,” Tripp says and Alex doesn’t say anything. There’s really nothing to say. If Tripp is really as opposed to the plan as he professes to be then Alex will wake up alongside Jenna and Mimi and nothing will have changed.
Tripp will still be dead, Nora will still be dead. He will have saved them from none of the pain and heart ache that he knows he can save them from.
If this works…
“You could have a future with Nora,” Alex says softly.
They could be a family, and Michael could have a future with Maria without his past with Alex continually hanging over their heads. He wants them to be happy and safe from his family. This is how he makes sure that happens.
“I could,” Tripp nods, “but you’re my family, blood sticks by blood. If that means that eventually I can be with Nora then it’ll happen when it happens but not because I abandon my family when they need me.”
*******************************************************
“What do you think they’re talking about in there?” Max asks and Michael shrugs, he’s actually not even sure why he’s there. But his mom had dragged him along behind her like the force of nature she’s been his entire life.
They’ll find out eventually, but he doesn’t expect she’s going to tell them anything other then what they already know or she feels that she needs them to know until she’s good and ready to share with them.
He can tell by the expression on the Sheriff’s face that he expects this as well.
“Probably whoever this mystery guy is that Jenna and Mimi were talking about,” Kyle says.
“Jenna was expecting there to be another pod with theirs,” Max says for Michael’s benefit.
“I thought only Jenna and Mimi were the ones missing?” he asks, they’ve certainly been the only ones that the Sheriff had anyone looking for.
“Time is a funny thing,” his mom says from the doorway to Jenna and Mimi’s room. She looks fragile in a way that he hasn’t seen since he was a young boy and she spent way too long waiting for some mystery ex to reappear.
Not his dad, she’s always been brutally honest that his dad was dead, but someone that she’d met and fallen for and who’d been snatched away by family obligations.
Michael thinks if he ever meets this guy that broke his mom’s heart that he’s going to have Isobel fry his brain, he’d do it himself but the mental stuff has never been his forte.
“They need a few minutes,” his mom says when Kyle makes to go back in the room and do his doctor stuff. He stares at her and she stares back and Kyle finally huffs and goes to slouch near the wall by Max, Michael knows if he focuses on them that he’ll see Max linking their pinky’s together, the only sign of affection he’ll show while he’s in uniform.
His dad wouldn’t care, Max is the only one that really cares about that.
“So should I be filing another missing person report?” the Sheriff asks and his mom shakes her head. The Sheriff arches an eyebrow at her and his mom folds her arms over her chest.
“I told you that time was a funny thing,” she says, “every little thing done in the past has a consequence in the future, and apparently it doesn’t take much of any sort of nudging for it to go in a completely different direction then it should have.”
*******************************************************
It’s two in the morning when he stumbles into the kitchen heading for the coffee maker. The lights are low but he can still see his mom sitting at the table, a box of faded old photos open in front of her.
The coffee is already made so he heads there before he sits down in the chair nearest her.
“I heard you still moving around,” she says by way of explanation, she has a photo between her fingers, it looks tattered and worn, obviously one that she’s taken out of hiding and held in a similar fashion before many times.
“Got a couple of projects with due dates coming up,” Michael shrugs. “Do my best work under pressure though so it’ll be fine.”
She just looks at him, and he cocks his head to the side. She looks tired, she should be sleeping but he’s certainly not going to say those words out loud.
Instead he reaches out and drags some of photos scattered across the table to him, scooping them up in his hand and flipping through them.
He’s not seen any of these. He can see Jenna and Mimi in several, his aunt Louise who died right after they came out of their pods and two men that have similar features and look familiar.
Like he’s seen at least the one on the right before, he doesn’t try and force it. His brain doesn’t like him forcing memories that aren’t at the forefront and he’s really not up for a nosebleed at 2 am when he’d like to get a couple more hours of work done before he heads to bed and if he gets a nosebleed his mom’ll turn on ‘mom mode’ and he’ll end up getting shuffled off to bed instead.
“That’s Alex and Tripp,” his mom says, tilting her head toward the photo he still has in his hands.
“Jenna’s mystery Alex,” he says and she nods her head once.
“Tripp is his…” her mouth twists as she thinks, “great uncle, great great uncle? I’m not really sure where Alex fell into Tripp’s timeline.”
“He looks familiar,” Michael says, because he kind of feels like it needs saying and he tries to hide as little as possible from his mom so she doesn’t have any reason to try and figure out if he’s hiding something. He came out as bi when he was nineteen in college strictly because she could tell something had happened and look so disappointed that he was keeping something from her.
He still doesn’t think she was expecting him to blurt it out like that if her expression was anything to go by.
“Tripp?” she asks slowly and he shakes his head.
“No, Jenna’s Alex,” he says and she just stares at him, mouth slightly agape as he sits the photo down, shoulders hunching in slightly. “He kind of looks like this computer guy at work, probably not him though that guys like my age; these pictures were taken, when? Back in 47? He’d be like going on ancient by this point.”
“They had the pod that Alex was in,” Nora says softly, she can’t seem to look away from the pictures and there’s something that looks like tentative bit of hope in her eyes when she does finally look up at him. “And they found two pods that the sent to Louise and I, they could have…” her voice drops off and she sighs.
“Were things that bad for him?” Michael asks, he can’t even imagine being so sure that his existence wasn’t necessary to anyone that he would feel like just ceasing to be would be the best overall solution.
“His relationship with his father was pretty volatile from what little I was able to decipher from things he told his uncle, and…” her face twists a bit, he’s positive she’s going to try and lie to him, or figure out a way to change the subject.
“He used to tell me about you,” she says gently, “how beautiful and smart and… he said he was the absolute worst thing that ever happened to you, that if he could do it all over again he would stay away and let you be with Maria and happy and…”
“Maria,” Michael says faintly disbelieving and a bit disturbed to boot. “I was dating Maria?”
His mom looks amused by the expression on his face, he wishes he could be amused, but he grew up with Maria and Isobel and Max like siblings, though…
“Is this why you made a point of telling us that Maria and I didn’t share any blood relation? That it was okay if,” he twitches, “she’s like my sister.”
“Alex seemed very sure of the fact that the two of you just needed him to be not there and you would be married with kids and possibly a dog, at the time I had no reason to not believe him.”
*******************************************************
When Michael finally stumbles out of his home office in the early afternoon Max is sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal pulled close to him and a magazine open in front of him.
Max is smart, but Michael knows he’s not really reading any of his scientific journals.
There’s a folder in the middle of the table that Michael ignores while he pours himself some more coffee, pops some bread in the toaster.
When he’s finished assembling his makeshift snack he sits across from his brother and drinks his coffee and eats his toast.
“Don’t you have a home of your own?” Michael asks and Max jus shrugs at him.
“Kyle’s on overnights this week, house is too quiet,” Max says, Michael folds his napkin into smaller and smaller squares and doesn’t respond.
“Kyle and I are fine,” Max finally says, Michael just raises an eyebrow. “We are, you can tell mom that we’re okay.”
“Sure.”
Max rolls his eyes at him, then directs his gaze towards the folder in the middle of the table.
“Sheriff know you’re bringing evidence home with you?” Michael asks and Max rolls his eyes again, even though Michael knows it’s not evidence. It’s a plain manilla folder and Max would never cross that line.
When Michael flips the folder open there’s a sketch there, it’s a profile sketch that is definitely Rosa’s doing and the guy is the one that was in his mom’s pictures.
“Jenna’s Alex,” Max says, even though Michael already knows that. “Jenna didn’t say it, Mimi hedged around it in that way she does, but I guess before he managed to erase himself from actual reality, he was your Alex too.”
Michael stares at the drawing, it’s a really impersonal drawing, Rosa doesn’t know him so she hadn’t managed to imbue it with that spark Rosa manages when she draws one of them.
“I know this guy,” Michael mutters and he taps his fingers against the edge of the drawing, not the drawing itself, he doesn’t want to smudge it.
“Michael,” Max says sharply and there’s a napkin pushed under his line of sight and Michael growls low in his throat but pushes the wad against his nose. He doesn’t need to pull it away to know that he’s pushed his brain to a nosebleed. “Tilt your head back,” Max advises and Kyle’s the doctor, not Max, but Max is a healer in their way so Michael listens to him.
Michael doesn’t know this guy; not enough to put a name to him, though Alex does seem to fit him, his brain is trying to force itself to make connections that it doesn’t have enough information to process through.
He closes his eyes and breathes, thinks, the guy is familiar, but he thinks he can confidently say it’s not someone he’s come into contact with in Roswell, if he had everyone else would be having this weird feeling of déjà vu as well.
And if he went to all the trouble to make sure he wasn’t born in the first place he wouldn’t randomly visit or lay down roots in any place where he’d meet any of the people he was trying to erase his presence from.
If it were him he’d be as far away as possible so as to give in to temptation and try and form new connections with people who now have no clue who he is.
Who he was.
He mentally flips through the places he’s gone and lived, he does it slowly because he already has the nosebleed and he can feel the pressure in his forehead screaming that a migraine is coming.
There’s not many places he’s gone, he’s only ever been out of state a handful of times and the think tank he works for allows him the freedom to work from home most of the time, only having to make trips out to San Francisco four times a year for project kick off’s and the random ‘thank god it’s finally fucking over’ closing party.
“IT,” he mumbles and he can feel Max’s hand ghosting over his face, one and cupping over his to force him to keep the wad of napkin pushed to his nose the other pressing against his forehead to get him to tilt his head back slightly. “He works for IT.”
“For your that think tank of yours?” Max says softly, his hand is gentle against his forehead and Michael is rifling through memories, trying to figure out the first time he saw him.
He must have been distracted by something or someone, if he’d come across a guy looking like that he would have tried to hit on him, Michael hasn’t hidden the fact he was bi since he was seventeen.
Michael’s not as good with the mental stuff as Isobel, but the first thing mom did before she let them go off to school with other kids was train them up on their gifts. He can heal if needed, can push into someone’s mind if his back is against the wall but he’s really good with the telekinesis.
Max is the healer, is like him with the others, but Michael can still sense him tapping on Michael’s mind to gain entrance. Wanting to see what Michael is seeing and he makes a face that he’s sure Max can’t see before he lets his brother in.
He’s still searching for that first elusive meeting, he knows he would have tried to meet him, guy looks like that he would have likely tossed out his don’t fuck where you work rule and made an exception.
It’s a jolt when he finds it, when he sees Jenna and Mimi’s Alex right there, sitting behind a computer, headphones on like all the other computer programmers he’s surrounded by and he can feel Max jerk beside him.
Michael lets out a breath, nudges Max out of his mind and puts his walls back up because Max is going to tell Isobel and mom and the last thing he wants is a midnight mental break in when they find out.
“What are you going to do?” Max asks, he watches with narrowed eyes as Michael pulls the napkin away, tries not to make a face at the blood there.
“Nothing,” Michael says. Max just stares at him and Michael stares back.
He’s not lying, not completely anyway.
He’s in the middle of a project, doesn’t have any reason to be back in San Francisco for at least a month and if he goes early he’ll get pulled into another project and he thinks Jenna and Mimi and probably his mom are going to forcing them spend a lot of that month figuring out how to undo what Alex has done.
If it’s even possible to undo it at all.
They might have to deal with the fact that the only Alex Manes they get to have is one that went through a lot of effort to make sure he wasn’t theirs.
*******************************************************
TITLE: Legacies
RATING: R (for language)
CHARACTERS: Alex Manes, Kyle Valenti, Michael Guerin, Max Evans, Isobel Evans, Liz Ortecho, Maria DeLuca, Jim Valenti, Jesse Manes, Mimi DeLuca, Nora Truman, Eugene (Tripp) Manes
PAIRING: Alex/Michael
AUTHOR: Melanie
Summary: Time is not unchangeable if someone has the time, patience and drive to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself. Even if it means removing oneself from the equation..
DISCLAIMER: I own nothing.
FEEDBACK: Please?
Lost to Time 3/?
”I don’t like this plan at all,” Tripp says and Alex doesn’t say anything. There’s really nothing to say. If Tripp is really as opposed to the plan as he professes to be then Alex will wake up alongside Jenna and Mimi and nothing will have changed.
Tripp will still be dead, Nora will still be dead. He will have saved them from none of the pain and heart ache that he knows he can save them from.
If this works…
“You could have a future with Nora,” Alex says softly.
They could be a family, and Michael could have a future with Maria without his past with Alex continually hanging over their heads. He wants them to be happy and safe from his family. This is how he makes sure that happens.
“I could,” Tripp nods, “but you’re my family, blood sticks by blood. If that means that eventually I can be with Nora then it’ll happen when it happens but not because I abandon my family when they need me.”
*******************************************************
“What do you think they’re talking about in there?” Max asks and Michael shrugs, he’s actually not even sure why he’s there. But his mom had dragged him along behind her like the force of nature she’s been his entire life.
They’ll find out eventually, but he doesn’t expect she’s going to tell them anything other then what they already know or she feels that she needs them to know until she’s good and ready to share with them.
He can tell by the expression on the Sheriff’s face that he expects this as well.
“Probably whoever this mystery guy is that Jenna and Mimi were talking about,” Kyle says.
“Jenna was expecting there to be another pod with theirs,” Max says for Michael’s benefit.
“I thought only Jenna and Mimi were the ones missing?” he asks, they’ve certainly been the only ones that the Sheriff had anyone looking for.
“Time is a funny thing,” his mom says from the doorway to Jenna and Mimi’s room. She looks fragile in a way that he hasn’t seen since he was a young boy and she spent way too long waiting for some mystery ex to reappear.
Not his dad, she’s always been brutally honest that his dad was dead, but someone that she’d met and fallen for and who’d been snatched away by family obligations.
Michael thinks if he ever meets this guy that broke his mom’s heart that he’s going to have Isobel fry his brain, he’d do it himself but the mental stuff has never been his forte.
“They need a few minutes,” his mom says when Kyle makes to go back in the room and do his doctor stuff. He stares at her and she stares back and Kyle finally huffs and goes to slouch near the wall by Max, Michael knows if he focuses on them that he’ll see Max linking their pinky’s together, the only sign of affection he’ll show while he’s in uniform.
His dad wouldn’t care, Max is the only one that really cares about that.
“So should I be filing another missing person report?” the Sheriff asks and his mom shakes her head. The Sheriff arches an eyebrow at her and his mom folds her arms over her chest.
“I told you that time was a funny thing,” she says, “every little thing done in the past has a consequence in the future, and apparently it doesn’t take much of any sort of nudging for it to go in a completely different direction then it should have.”
*******************************************************
It’s two in the morning when he stumbles into the kitchen heading for the coffee maker. The lights are low but he can still see his mom sitting at the table, a box of faded old photos open in front of her.
The coffee is already made so he heads there before he sits down in the chair nearest her.
“I heard you still moving around,” she says by way of explanation, she has a photo between her fingers, it looks tattered and worn, obviously one that she’s taken out of hiding and held in a similar fashion before many times.
“Got a couple of projects with due dates coming up,” Michael shrugs. “Do my best work under pressure though so it’ll be fine.”
She just looks at him, and he cocks his head to the side. She looks tired, she should be sleeping but he’s certainly not going to say those words out loud.
Instead he reaches out and drags some of photos scattered across the table to him, scooping them up in his hand and flipping through them.
He’s not seen any of these. He can see Jenna and Mimi in several, his aunt Louise who died right after they came out of their pods and two men that have similar features and look familiar.
Like he’s seen at least the one on the right before, he doesn’t try and force it. His brain doesn’t like him forcing memories that aren’t at the forefront and he’s really not up for a nosebleed at 2 am when he’d like to get a couple more hours of work done before he heads to bed and if he gets a nosebleed his mom’ll turn on ‘mom mode’ and he’ll end up getting shuffled off to bed instead.
“That’s Alex and Tripp,” his mom says, tilting her head toward the photo he still has in his hands.
“Jenna’s mystery Alex,” he says and she nods her head once.
“Tripp is his…” her mouth twists as she thinks, “great uncle, great great uncle? I’m not really sure where Alex fell into Tripp’s timeline.”
“He looks familiar,” Michael says, because he kind of feels like it needs saying and he tries to hide as little as possible from his mom so she doesn’t have any reason to try and figure out if he’s hiding something. He came out as bi when he was nineteen in college strictly because she could tell something had happened and look so disappointed that he was keeping something from her.
He still doesn’t think she was expecting him to blurt it out like that if her expression was anything to go by.
“Tripp?” she asks slowly and he shakes his head.
“No, Jenna’s Alex,” he says and she just stares at him, mouth slightly agape as he sits the photo down, shoulders hunching in slightly. “He kind of looks like this computer guy at work, probably not him though that guys like my age; these pictures were taken, when? Back in 47? He’d be like going on ancient by this point.”
“They had the pod that Alex was in,” Nora says softly, she can’t seem to look away from the pictures and there’s something that looks like tentative bit of hope in her eyes when she does finally look up at him. “And they found two pods that the sent to Louise and I, they could have…” her voice drops off and she sighs.
“Were things that bad for him?” Michael asks, he can’t even imagine being so sure that his existence wasn’t necessary to anyone that he would feel like just ceasing to be would be the best overall solution.
“His relationship with his father was pretty volatile from what little I was able to decipher from things he told his uncle, and…” her face twists a bit, he’s positive she’s going to try and lie to him, or figure out a way to change the subject.
“He used to tell me about you,” she says gently, “how beautiful and smart and… he said he was the absolute worst thing that ever happened to you, that if he could do it all over again he would stay away and let you be with Maria and happy and…”
“Maria,” Michael says faintly disbelieving and a bit disturbed to boot. “I was dating Maria?”
His mom looks amused by the expression on his face, he wishes he could be amused, but he grew up with Maria and Isobel and Max like siblings, though…
“Is this why you made a point of telling us that Maria and I didn’t share any blood relation? That it was okay if,” he twitches, “she’s like my sister.”
“Alex seemed very sure of the fact that the two of you just needed him to be not there and you would be married with kids and possibly a dog, at the time I had no reason to not believe him.”
*******************************************************
When Michael finally stumbles out of his home office in the early afternoon Max is sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal pulled close to him and a magazine open in front of him.
Max is smart, but Michael knows he’s not really reading any of his scientific journals.
There’s a folder in the middle of the table that Michael ignores while he pours himself some more coffee, pops some bread in the toaster.
When he’s finished assembling his makeshift snack he sits across from his brother and drinks his coffee and eats his toast.
“Don’t you have a home of your own?” Michael asks and Max jus shrugs at him.
“Kyle’s on overnights this week, house is too quiet,” Max says, Michael folds his napkin into smaller and smaller squares and doesn’t respond.
“Kyle and I are fine,” Max finally says, Michael just raises an eyebrow. “We are, you can tell mom that we’re okay.”
“Sure.”
Max rolls his eyes at him, then directs his gaze towards the folder in the middle of the table.
“Sheriff know you’re bringing evidence home with you?” Michael asks and Max rolls his eyes again, even though Michael knows it’s not evidence. It’s a plain manilla folder and Max would never cross that line.
When Michael flips the folder open there’s a sketch there, it’s a profile sketch that is definitely Rosa’s doing and the guy is the one that was in his mom’s pictures.
“Jenna’s Alex,” Max says, even though Michael already knows that. “Jenna didn’t say it, Mimi hedged around it in that way she does, but I guess before he managed to erase himself from actual reality, he was your Alex too.”
Michael stares at the drawing, it’s a really impersonal drawing, Rosa doesn’t know him so she hadn’t managed to imbue it with that spark Rosa manages when she draws one of them.
“I know this guy,” Michael mutters and he taps his fingers against the edge of the drawing, not the drawing itself, he doesn’t want to smudge it.
“Michael,” Max says sharply and there’s a napkin pushed under his line of sight and Michael growls low in his throat but pushes the wad against his nose. He doesn’t need to pull it away to know that he’s pushed his brain to a nosebleed. “Tilt your head back,” Max advises and Kyle’s the doctor, not Max, but Max is a healer in their way so Michael listens to him.
Michael doesn’t know this guy; not enough to put a name to him, though Alex does seem to fit him, his brain is trying to force itself to make connections that it doesn’t have enough information to process through.
He closes his eyes and breathes, thinks, the guy is familiar, but he thinks he can confidently say it’s not someone he’s come into contact with in Roswell, if he had everyone else would be having this weird feeling of déjà vu as well.
And if he went to all the trouble to make sure he wasn’t born in the first place he wouldn’t randomly visit or lay down roots in any place where he’d meet any of the people he was trying to erase his presence from.
If it were him he’d be as far away as possible so as to give in to temptation and try and form new connections with people who now have no clue who he is.
Who he was.
He mentally flips through the places he’s gone and lived, he does it slowly because he already has the nosebleed and he can feel the pressure in his forehead screaming that a migraine is coming.
There’s not many places he’s gone, he’s only ever been out of state a handful of times and the think tank he works for allows him the freedom to work from home most of the time, only having to make trips out to San Francisco four times a year for project kick off’s and the random ‘thank god it’s finally fucking over’ closing party.
“IT,” he mumbles and he can feel Max’s hand ghosting over his face, one and cupping over his to force him to keep the wad of napkin pushed to his nose the other pressing against his forehead to get him to tilt his head back slightly. “He works for IT.”
“For your that think tank of yours?” Max says softly, his hand is gentle against his forehead and Michael is rifling through memories, trying to figure out the first time he saw him.
He must have been distracted by something or someone, if he’d come across a guy looking like that he would have tried to hit on him, Michael hasn’t hidden the fact he was bi since he was seventeen.
Michael’s not as good with the mental stuff as Isobel, but the first thing mom did before she let them go off to school with other kids was train them up on their gifts. He can heal if needed, can push into someone’s mind if his back is against the wall but he’s really good with the telekinesis.
Max is the healer, is like him with the others, but Michael can still sense him tapping on Michael’s mind to gain entrance. Wanting to see what Michael is seeing and he makes a face that he’s sure Max can’t see before he lets his brother in.
He’s still searching for that first elusive meeting, he knows he would have tried to meet him, guy looks like that he would have likely tossed out his don’t fuck where you work rule and made an exception.
It’s a jolt when he finds it, when he sees Jenna and Mimi’s Alex right there, sitting behind a computer, headphones on like all the other computer programmers he’s surrounded by and he can feel Max jerk beside him.
Michael lets out a breath, nudges Max out of his mind and puts his walls back up because Max is going to tell Isobel and mom and the last thing he wants is a midnight mental break in when they find out.
“What are you going to do?” Max asks, he watches with narrowed eyes as Michael pulls the napkin away, tries not to make a face at the blood there.
“Nothing,” Michael says. Max just stares at him and Michael stares back.
He’s not lying, not completely anyway.
He’s in the middle of a project, doesn’t have any reason to be back in San Francisco for at least a month and if he goes early he’ll get pulled into another project and he thinks Jenna and Mimi and probably his mom are going to forcing them spend a lot of that month figuring out how to undo what Alex has done.
If it’s even possible to undo it at all.
They might have to deal with the fact that the only Alex Manes they get to have is one that went through a lot of effort to make sure he wasn’t theirs.
*******************************************************