FIC: Roswell New Mexico - Lost to Time 8/?
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, Kyle/Max
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 8/?
When the ladies go upstairs to do whatever it is that they’re doing that results in all the shushed giggling Tripp goes searching for Alex.
He’s out on the edge of the property, leaning up against a fence that needs to be painted and staring off into the distance with a pensive look on this face.
“Sounds like Nora and Louise think that they’ll have the pods ready in a few days or so,” he says and Alex nods. He was at dinner, he heard the same thing that Tripp did.
“What are you going to do?” Alex asks, his voice is soft and quiet. There’s a tone there that that Tripp doesn’t like.
“I told you I’d help you,” Tripp says, he folds his arms together. “Still can’t say I think it’s the right decision in the long run.”
“Shutting down Shepherd or…”
“No,” Tripp shakes his head, “no, shutting down Project Shepherd is the right decision, shouldn’t have even been allowed in the first place… It’s the other thing I have a problem with.”
“Tripp…”
“Look, just hear me out, we shut down the project then your dad, he doesn’t get raised up to hate aliens right? He doesn’t have that family legacy hanging over his head, maybe he makes different choices.”
“My dad didn’t attack Michael because he was an alien,” Alex says, Tripp doesn’t look over at him. He and Nora have talked about this, trying to tie the little bits of information that Alex has let slip, that comments that Jenna and Mimi have made into some sort of sense.
He understands why Alex wouldn’t share this information with him, especially knowing what little bit he knows about how Alex was raised, he probably had no reason to think that Tripp’s reactions wouldn’t mirror his fathers.
“If you do this,” Tripp says slowly, “there isn’t any undoing it. They won’t be your family anymore, they’ll be…”
“They’ll be happy,” Alex says firmly, “they’ll be happy and safe and… they’ll be happy, that’s what matters.”
*******************************************************
It’s a short flight in the grand scheme of things, he’s been on longer, there’s been international flights with multiple connections and long layovers with the prosthetic. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to way he’s always completely drained at the end of any of them.
“I’m fine,” he mutters, he rolls his shoulders as much as he’s able, there’s a knot in the middle of his back and a heavy weight on his shoulder and neck that he thinks is only partially at the thought of seeing Jenna and Mimi.
“Maybe I should call Nora and postpone until tomorrow,” Tripp directs to the backseat where Abraham is sitting with his hands folded together in his lap.
“You could, but she already knows where we’re staying so chances are high that she’ll just appear with Jenna and Mimi in tow at our doors regardless,” Alex says tiredly.
Tripp just hums at him vaguely though he continues driving and finally parks in front of a small little bungalow that Alex only has the faintest of recollections of.
Jenna is already standing in the doorway, arms folded across her chest and scowl firmly in place, he can see Mimi just over her shoulder and he can’t see Nora but he’s sure she’s directly behind them.
“Maybe we should put this off until tomorrow,” he says and he can see Jenna narrowing her eyes like she can hear him.
Abraham ruffles his hair as he unfastens his seatbelt, door opening behind him.
“It’ll be okay,” Tripp says as Abraham opens his door, brace already in his hands. He doesn’t use it much anymore, not if he can get away without it. But he’s almost stupidly grateful for the fact that at least one of his hands will be occupied and it drops the probability of physical harm but a large percentage.
He still steps out of the car and squares his shoulder like he’s going off into battle, hip and leg already stiff with the forced inactivity as he moves forward. Meeting Jenna and Mimi halfway.
“You…” Jenna waves her hands at him, then punches him in the arm not gripping the brace before hugging him tightly. “Jesus Christ Manes,” she mutters into his shoulder before releasing him to allow Mimi to fold him into a tight hug.
“Abraham?” he hears Nora’s disbelieving voice before he sees her appear over Mimi’s shoulder.
He exchanges a confused look with Tripp as Mimi keeps an arm looped around him while still allowing him to turn slightly.
Abraham just smiles fondly at them all.
“I can explain.”
*******************************************************
Nora doesn’t think that Alex is escaping Mimi or Jenna’s grips any time soon, they’re sitting on the couch flipping through Jenna’s notebook and talking in quiet voices.
She could strain and hear them, she could dip into Alex’s mind and figure out what exactly is going on because Alex should not exist.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Tripp says quietly next to her, Abraham is milling around Jenna’s living room. Picking up and putting down random things.
And Abraham is another whole issue to add into the mix.
“I don’t even know what I’m thinking,” she says.
“You’re thinking that the moment that we convinced Mindy to really leave Jesse before she got pregnant with Alex that he should have ceased to exist,” Tripp says matter-of-factly.
So maybe he does know what she’s thinking, but not the whole of it.
“Plus you’re wondering how we came to have Abraham with us,” he adds.
“They tried to send me to you and Louise,” Abraham says, appearing behind Tripp’s shoulder. He’s so much older then he was the last time that Nora saw him. Whatever else he was up to spending large chunks of time in a pod was not factored into that.
“I spoke to Louise privately,” Abraham continues, “and she asked me if I wouldn’t mind staying with Tripp and Alex, that they needed help more then she needed another person to try to explain.”
“She never said anything,” Nora says and Abraham smiles gently at her, the same gentle smile he’d managed when he’d told her that her husband was dead and that rescuing the boy and fleeing with Michael and Isobel was all her and Louise’s shoulders.
“They rescued me, us. Freed us before any lasting damage could be done and I sent the rest on to you and Louise but I felt and Louise concurred that they were going to need assistance for their fools errands.”
Tripp arches an eyebrow at him and Nora tilts her head in the direction of the kitchen.
Jenna’s backyard is fenced in and semi-private enough she thinks.
“You call it a fools errand, but it worked,” Tripp says once the door is shut behind them. The door squeaks when it opens, they’ll hear it if one of the other three tries to come out though all three of them are sneaky in their own way.
“It did,” Abraham agrees, “because it didn’t.”
Tripp just stares at him, then turns to look at her like she can offer any clarification; she shrugs because she’s done the searches. She had Jim Valenti do the searches as well.
There was no child named Alex born to Jesse and Mindy.
“Because he wasn’t born to them, not in any legal sense,” Abraham says and she narrows her eyes at him.
“Mindy came to me when she was about two months along, Tripp and Alex were already in the pods having completed what they thought was their last needed task. I got her papers and when it was time Anna Marie Manes gave birth to her and her husband Eugene’s only child, she died from complications after having given birth and Eugene’s father took custody of the child since his only son was currently deployed and unable to return immediately. After a brief time for recovery Mindy went on her way,” Abraham recites, like he’s telling a bedtime story, “I send her pictures every few months.”
“He doesn’t know,” Nora says and Abraham shakes his head.
“No, much like the other two this timeline was created based on actions they took, they’re the only ones who will remember the other. I’ve not pushed since he came out of the pod, but he’s never had any flashes of memory of anything to do with this line. I’m not sure memories from this line will eventually merge with their existing memories or not.”
“He’s going to be so mad,” Tripp says, he sits down heavily in one of the patio chairs and covers his face with his hands. “He’s going to be so mad and I’m not going to be the one that explains it to him.”
“No,” Abraham shakes his head, “I’m sure it’ll fall on my shoulders, but I also knew when Mindy came to me and I made the choices I did that I would need to explain what happened at some point. He had a good childhood,” he says, almost as an afterthought. “I made sure of that, it’s almost a shame that he’s not likely to remember any of it.”
*******************************************************
“What do you think they’re talking about out there?” Jenna asks, Mimi has gone into the kitchen, Alex thinks she’s going to try and figure out what the other three are discussing. He hopes that means she’ll report back if she’s able.
“Alien things that our puny human brains can’t handle?” he says flipping through Jenna’s notebook. She’s wrote everything down from the time she originally arrived in Roswell and all her interactions. All the people she met and the things that happened during that time.
It’s a smart idea, he should do something like this, document the life he led, the person he was, the people he loved.
“Are you going to try and see him while you’re here?” Jenna asks quietly.
Alex sits there for a moment, stares at Jenna’s curved handwriting that inexplicably switches from blue to black ink in the middle of a word so she probably ran out of ink.
It feels like it’s the only thing he’s thought about since Tripp affirmed that Michael had seen him and Michael had started actively searching for him even though he’s got no real reason to.
He doesn’t know anything about Alex except as a face in Nora’s photographs and Jenna and Mimi and probably Nora’s insistence that he exists as someone that once loved him enough to give him up.
Does he try and see Michael? Does he introduce himself without the looming threat of injury at Jesse Manes’ hands?
See if maybe they can have a future now, without the specter of the past hanging over them.
“I don’t know if I should see any of them,” he says finally and he doesn’t look over because he doesn’t want to see Jenna’s disappointed look.
“You can’t hide forever,” she says a blunt edge to her words, “they know about you and Michael, at the very least, is not going to allow you to.”
Alex sighs and he silently agrees with her, but that doesn’t mean that he has to verbally agree with her as well.
The last three pages of her notebook are bullet point changes, the ‘Alex not here’, ‘Rosa is alive?’ are both underlined and the ‘Max and Kyle????’
Which had also been something that took him by surprise.
“Do we even know when that happened?” he asks wonderingly. Max and Kyle could barely be in the same room together without passive aggressively arguing about Liz.
“Keeping in mind that I’m having to figure it all out by asking questions that I should apparently already know the answer to, the short answer is they were high school sweethearts or something? They’ve been on again and off again and then on again since they were seventeen,” Jenna bites on her lower lip. “It’s really fucking bizarre because apparently we never had a thing here but I have really vivid memories of him naked and us screwing around.”
“You’re actively avoiding Max,” Alex says and Jenna nods.
“I’m actively avoiding both of them, because Kyle and I are friends and if he figures out that I know what Max looks like naked they’re going to have another fight and I’m not going to be the cause of that.” Jenna scowls and looks annoyed.
“They’re really fucking cute together, it’s really annoying because I’m sure other me thought they were #relationshipgoals or something.”
*******************************************************
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, Kyle/Max
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 8/?
When the ladies go upstairs to do whatever it is that they’re doing that results in all the shushed giggling Tripp goes searching for Alex.
He’s out on the edge of the property, leaning up against a fence that needs to be painted and staring off into the distance with a pensive look on this face.
“Sounds like Nora and Louise think that they’ll have the pods ready in a few days or so,” he says and Alex nods. He was at dinner, he heard the same thing that Tripp did.
“What are you going to do?” Alex asks, his voice is soft and quiet. There’s a tone there that that Tripp doesn’t like.
“I told you I’d help you,” Tripp says, he folds his arms together. “Still can’t say I think it’s the right decision in the long run.”
“Shutting down Shepherd or…”
“No,” Tripp shakes his head, “no, shutting down Project Shepherd is the right decision, shouldn’t have even been allowed in the first place… It’s the other thing I have a problem with.”
“Tripp…”
“Look, just hear me out, we shut down the project then your dad, he doesn’t get raised up to hate aliens right? He doesn’t have that family legacy hanging over his head, maybe he makes different choices.”
“My dad didn’t attack Michael because he was an alien,” Alex says, Tripp doesn’t look over at him. He and Nora have talked about this, trying to tie the little bits of information that Alex has let slip, that comments that Jenna and Mimi have made into some sort of sense.
He understands why Alex wouldn’t share this information with him, especially knowing what little bit he knows about how Alex was raised, he probably had no reason to think that Tripp’s reactions wouldn’t mirror his fathers.
“If you do this,” Tripp says slowly, “there isn’t any undoing it. They won’t be your family anymore, they’ll be…”
“They’ll be happy,” Alex says firmly, “they’ll be happy and safe and… they’ll be happy, that’s what matters.”
*******************************************************
It’s a short flight in the grand scheme of things, he’s been on longer, there’s been international flights with multiple connections and long layovers with the prosthetic. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to way he’s always completely drained at the end of any of them.
“I’m fine,” he mutters, he rolls his shoulders as much as he’s able, there’s a knot in the middle of his back and a heavy weight on his shoulder and neck that he thinks is only partially at the thought of seeing Jenna and Mimi.
“Maybe I should call Nora and postpone until tomorrow,” Tripp directs to the backseat where Abraham is sitting with his hands folded together in his lap.
“You could, but she already knows where we’re staying so chances are high that she’ll just appear with Jenna and Mimi in tow at our doors regardless,” Alex says tiredly.
Tripp just hums at him vaguely though he continues driving and finally parks in front of a small little bungalow that Alex only has the faintest of recollections of.
Jenna is already standing in the doorway, arms folded across her chest and scowl firmly in place, he can see Mimi just over her shoulder and he can’t see Nora but he’s sure she’s directly behind them.
“Maybe we should put this off until tomorrow,” he says and he can see Jenna narrowing her eyes like she can hear him.
Abraham ruffles his hair as he unfastens his seatbelt, door opening behind him.
“It’ll be okay,” Tripp says as Abraham opens his door, brace already in his hands. He doesn’t use it much anymore, not if he can get away without it. But he’s almost stupidly grateful for the fact that at least one of his hands will be occupied and it drops the probability of physical harm but a large percentage.
He still steps out of the car and squares his shoulder like he’s going off into battle, hip and leg already stiff with the forced inactivity as he moves forward. Meeting Jenna and Mimi halfway.
“You…” Jenna waves her hands at him, then punches him in the arm not gripping the brace before hugging him tightly. “Jesus Christ Manes,” she mutters into his shoulder before releasing him to allow Mimi to fold him into a tight hug.
“Abraham?” he hears Nora’s disbelieving voice before he sees her appear over Mimi’s shoulder.
He exchanges a confused look with Tripp as Mimi keeps an arm looped around him while still allowing him to turn slightly.
Abraham just smiles fondly at them all.
“I can explain.”
*******************************************************
Nora doesn’t think that Alex is escaping Mimi or Jenna’s grips any time soon, they’re sitting on the couch flipping through Jenna’s notebook and talking in quiet voices.
She could strain and hear them, she could dip into Alex’s mind and figure out what exactly is going on because Alex should not exist.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Tripp says quietly next to her, Abraham is milling around Jenna’s living room. Picking up and putting down random things.
And Abraham is another whole issue to add into the mix.
“I don’t even know what I’m thinking,” she says.
“You’re thinking that the moment that we convinced Mindy to really leave Jesse before she got pregnant with Alex that he should have ceased to exist,” Tripp says matter-of-factly.
So maybe he does know what she’s thinking, but not the whole of it.
“Plus you’re wondering how we came to have Abraham with us,” he adds.
“They tried to send me to you and Louise,” Abraham says, appearing behind Tripp’s shoulder. He’s so much older then he was the last time that Nora saw him. Whatever else he was up to spending large chunks of time in a pod was not factored into that.
“I spoke to Louise privately,” Abraham continues, “and she asked me if I wouldn’t mind staying with Tripp and Alex, that they needed help more then she needed another person to try to explain.”
“She never said anything,” Nora says and Abraham smiles gently at her, the same gentle smile he’d managed when he’d told her that her husband was dead and that rescuing the boy and fleeing with Michael and Isobel was all her and Louise’s shoulders.
“They rescued me, us. Freed us before any lasting damage could be done and I sent the rest on to you and Louise but I felt and Louise concurred that they were going to need assistance for their fools errands.”
Tripp arches an eyebrow at him and Nora tilts her head in the direction of the kitchen.
Jenna’s backyard is fenced in and semi-private enough she thinks.
“You call it a fools errand, but it worked,” Tripp says once the door is shut behind them. The door squeaks when it opens, they’ll hear it if one of the other three tries to come out though all three of them are sneaky in their own way.
“It did,” Abraham agrees, “because it didn’t.”
Tripp just stares at him, then turns to look at her like she can offer any clarification; she shrugs because she’s done the searches. She had Jim Valenti do the searches as well.
There was no child named Alex born to Jesse and Mindy.
“Because he wasn’t born to them, not in any legal sense,” Abraham says and she narrows her eyes at him.
“Mindy came to me when she was about two months along, Tripp and Alex were already in the pods having completed what they thought was their last needed task. I got her papers and when it was time Anna Marie Manes gave birth to her and her husband Eugene’s only child, she died from complications after having given birth and Eugene’s father took custody of the child since his only son was currently deployed and unable to return immediately. After a brief time for recovery Mindy went on her way,” Abraham recites, like he’s telling a bedtime story, “I send her pictures every few months.”
“He doesn’t know,” Nora says and Abraham shakes his head.
“No, much like the other two this timeline was created based on actions they took, they’re the only ones who will remember the other. I’ve not pushed since he came out of the pod, but he’s never had any flashes of memory of anything to do with this line. I’m not sure memories from this line will eventually merge with their existing memories or not.”
“He’s going to be so mad,” Tripp says, he sits down heavily in one of the patio chairs and covers his face with his hands. “He’s going to be so mad and I’m not going to be the one that explains it to him.”
“No,” Abraham shakes his head, “I’m sure it’ll fall on my shoulders, but I also knew when Mindy came to me and I made the choices I did that I would need to explain what happened at some point. He had a good childhood,” he says, almost as an afterthought. “I made sure of that, it’s almost a shame that he’s not likely to remember any of it.”
*******************************************************
“What do you think they’re talking about out there?” Jenna asks, Mimi has gone into the kitchen, Alex thinks she’s going to try and figure out what the other three are discussing. He hopes that means she’ll report back if she’s able.
“Alien things that our puny human brains can’t handle?” he says flipping through Jenna’s notebook. She’s wrote everything down from the time she originally arrived in Roswell and all her interactions. All the people she met and the things that happened during that time.
It’s a smart idea, he should do something like this, document the life he led, the person he was, the people he loved.
“Are you going to try and see him while you’re here?” Jenna asks quietly.
Alex sits there for a moment, stares at Jenna’s curved handwriting that inexplicably switches from blue to black ink in the middle of a word so she probably ran out of ink.
It feels like it’s the only thing he’s thought about since Tripp affirmed that Michael had seen him and Michael had started actively searching for him even though he’s got no real reason to.
He doesn’t know anything about Alex except as a face in Nora’s photographs and Jenna and Mimi and probably Nora’s insistence that he exists as someone that once loved him enough to give him up.
Does he try and see Michael? Does he introduce himself without the looming threat of injury at Jesse Manes’ hands?
See if maybe they can have a future now, without the specter of the past hanging over them.
“I don’t know if I should see any of them,” he says finally and he doesn’t look over because he doesn’t want to see Jenna’s disappointed look.
“You can’t hide forever,” she says a blunt edge to her words, “they know about you and Michael, at the very least, is not going to allow you to.”
Alex sighs and he silently agrees with her, but that doesn’t mean that he has to verbally agree with her as well.
The last three pages of her notebook are bullet point changes, the ‘Alex not here’, ‘Rosa is alive?’ are both underlined and the ‘Max and Kyle????’
Which had also been something that took him by surprise.
“Do we even know when that happened?” he asks wonderingly. Max and Kyle could barely be in the same room together without passive aggressively arguing about Liz.
“Keeping in mind that I’m having to figure it all out by asking questions that I should apparently already know the answer to, the short answer is they were high school sweethearts or something? They’ve been on again and off again and then on again since they were seventeen,” Jenna bites on her lower lip. “It’s really fucking bizarre because apparently we never had a thing here but I have really vivid memories of him naked and us screwing around.”
“You’re actively avoiding Max,” Alex says and Jenna nods.
“I’m actively avoiding both of them, because Kyle and I are friends and if he figures out that I know what Max looks like naked they’re going to have another fight and I’m not going to be the cause of that.” Jenna scowls and looks annoyed.
“They’re really fucking cute together, it’s really annoying because I’m sure other me thought they were #relationshipgoals or something.”
*******************************************************