FIC: Roswell New Mexico - Lost to Time 9/?
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 9/?
They look they’re sleeping, lined up against the wall, eyes closed and features lax. Though Tripp thinks if he looks hard enough, he can still see the lines in Alex’s face.
“Do they dream in there?” he wonders, he kind of hopes not, even with the tiniest bit of information that Alex has offered them on his life before he came to them has been rife with trauma.
“I don’t remember anything from my time in our pods,” Nora says from behind him.
He straightens, rolling his shoulders and steeling himself for the conversation that Nora wants to have. He’s sure Louise wants to have it as well, but she’s leaving it up to Nora to try and dissuade him from the path that he and Alex have charted for themselves.
“If I asked you to leave it…” she starts and he shakes his head.
“It’s the right thing to do,” he says firmly. “I have to at least try.”
Even if he doesn’t wake Alex to assist, he can’t let his brother continue on as he is. Can’t let Nora end up being imprisoned like a criminal for the simple act of fleeing a dying planet and existing.
“At least leave Alex out of it, let him sleep and wake in a world where he still has a future,” she says, she reaches out to touch his arm, squeezing gently and staring at him. He doesn’t meet her eyes, he’s pretty sure if he goes down this road that means that any chance he might have been able to have with Nora is going to have to be given up.
“I’m going to talk to Harlan,” he says, he knows it’s a futile exercise. But Harlan is his brother, he has to at least make the effort, “maybe I can talk him around, get him to see the other side of this insanity before it’s too late and I won’t ever have to figure out how Alex’s plan is going to work.”
*******************************************************
“I kind of thought you’d just go into my head and pull out any plan that Alex and I had and consider it done,” Tripp says. He’s trying not to focus on the fact that the Abraham had apparently raised a little Alex Manes and that there’s somewhere out there a birth certificate for him that lists him as Alex’s father.
How did he even miss that? Abraham woke him up not too long before Alex that last time, had he timed them waking for after the Alex in this timeline got shuttled back to the past?
He’s going to need to ask for the specifics, because at some point they’re going to need to tell Alex. Abraham says he’s going to tell the young man he considers his grandson, but Tripp also knows that Abraham is going to pull the frail old grandfather card and foist it all off on Tripp.
There better be at least one photo album of baby pictures in this for him.
He’d scowl at Abraham and ask but the other man has gone back into the house to get something to drink and likely determine what the other are talking about.
“Don’t think we didn’t talk about it,” Nora says, “but honestly I didn’t think you were even going to be able to move Alex’s pod by yourself, let alone the two of you actually pull of seeing Project Shepherd scuttled.”
“I thought we were going to leave the pod there, the original plan was to just wake Alex up clear out Caulfield, though it wasn’t officially called that yet, destroy everything we could get our hands of for Shepherd and Alex would go back in the pod before you and Louise even knew he was missing,” Tripp says, he drags a hand over his face.
“So what changed?” Nora sits down in the chair next to him, they’re angled close together.
“Alex, when we thought we were successful in splitting up his folks he convinced me that putting the third pod back with Jenna and Mimi’s would only cause confusion,” Tripp sighs heavily. “You don’t know how much I wish that I’d just sent him off to sleep and had Abraham help me move his pod back in position.”
He looks over at the door where he can see the shadow of figures in the kitchen, Abraham and he thinks Mimi are by the door.
“He says he’s going to be the one to tell Alex but I know he’s going to finagle his way out of it and it’ll fall on my shoulders.”
Nora smiles at him, her gentle amused smile that he’s missed seeing.
“How do you know him?” he asks, and he winces at the stiffness in his voice, he doesn’t look over at her because he doesn’t want to see her silently judging him.
“Abraham?” she asks, she tilts her head to the side and looks over her shoulder at where the door to the house remains shut, “he was a friend of my husbands, Michael’s father… he was with us when we fled, in the chaos of the crash I’m not sure when we all became separated. I wasn’t even aware that he still lived until he appeared with you, Louise never told me…”
He looks over at her and she’s biting her lower lip between her teeth, her expression pensive with a small amount of annoyance.
“It makes me wonder what other things Louise decided were not important enough to share with me.”
*******************************************************
Alex doesn’t want to interrupt them, he spent the several months when they were hiding out in the past originally interrupting every quiet moment the two managed to take.
But he’s tired and he’s getting the wrong side of hungry and even though Jenna has offered to feed him and house him and basically chain him up in her basement until he agrees to whatever she wants from him…
He needs some quiet, he needs the solitude of a hotel room that holds no memories and an hour to sit and breathe.
He also needs to disconnect the prosthetic and take some painkillers with food of some sort.
“I’m going to have Abraham take me to hotel,” he finally pushes the door open and says. Neither of them jump, they both look up like they hadn’t just been talking with heads bent close together smiling gently at each other.
It makes his heart ache a little bit that he kept Tripp from Nora, but once they were done he thought Tripp would go to her, he didn’t think about putting it in writing somewhere that once Shepherd was done, Caulfield was empty and they had successfully managed to keep his parents from having a fourth child…
He probably should have, Tripp is loyal to an extreme that he hadn’t thought possible.
“Hold on,” Tripp says, he pushes himself to his feet, holding out a hand to pull Nora to hers as well. She smiles prettily at him and Alex thinks maybe he didn’t completely ruin things between them.
Maybe they’ll be able to have a future after all.
“You can stay, maybe one of them…” Alex starts and Tripp shakes his head.
“It’s been a long day, I think some food and some sleep and then maybe we plan to meet up again tomorrow and figure out a game plan,” Tripp says, he glances over at Nora and she nods her head in agreement.
“Jesse stopped in to see the Sheriff, asked him to dig into a cousin and uncle he’d never heard of, you should maybe think about familial addresses while you’re here, it might raise an eyebrow if you’re calling the man who’s supposed to be dad, Tripp and Grandpa, Abraham,” Nora says.
“Fit of teenage rebellion that never went away,” Alex waves. “The better question is why are you talking to my... Jesse?”
“I wasn’t, I don’t,” Nora shakes her head. “The Sheriff and I and Michelle sometimes get together to gossip about our sons, other stuff too…. But other stuff has been really quiet, so it’s really mostly centered around the boys right now.”
Alex blinks at her in confusion and she laughs at him.
“Max and Kyle,” she clarifies, “when they came out of the pods I took in all three of them, didn’t make sense to separate them if I didn’t need to.”
*******************************************************
There’s a brief moment before Michael leaves his house to go potentially stalk an ex-boyfriend that has taken great lengths to make sure he doesn’t know any damn thing about him that he thinks about renting a car.
He doesn’t because he’s already running behind schedule but also because he’s hoping that maybe his mom and Jenna and Mimi will be distracted enough by Alex, Tripp and their mysterious third that they won’t clock his truck parked three houses down around the slight bend.
He watches the car pull up and the older gentleman that he doesn’t know get out of the back. The one climbing out from behind the wheel is unmistakably Tripp, he’s older, but he’s still got the same exact look as the man in his mom’s pictures.
It’s the other man, the one that’s having his door opened by the older man with a brace in his hand and Michael frowns as Alex emerges.
And it is Alex, the one he remembers seeing bent over a computer, heads phone on, completely focused on whatever task he was performing at the time.
He looks tired as he braces an arm against the door to steady himself then takes the brace from the other man.
No one had said he’d been injured in some way, not his mom or Jenna or Mimi. Not a single one of them.
He watches as Jenna hugs him first, then Mimi. Then watches them all disappear into the house.
He should march up to that door and demand answers to questions that he doesn’t even know how to phrase properly.
It’s only 45 minutes later when he hears the car pull up behind him, a glance in the rear view mirror shows Max, not in uniform climbing out. He taps on the passenger window and waits patiently while Michael contemplates just ignoring him.
But Max won’t go away and worse he could probably walk right up to Jenna’s door and be let in.
He unlocks the door and Max climbs in, makes himself comfortable, propping and arm against the window and staring at Jenna’s house.
“I’m not doing anything,” Michael says finally, after they sit there in silence for just shy of ten minutes.
“I know,” Max nods, he doesn’t look over at him. “Just Kyle and I were talking about it and it seemed kind of cruel that we all knew you were going to be out here by yourself just watching. Kyle had a shift or he would have come too, I thought about asking Maria and Isobel to come, but they’d probably be just goading you to go up to the house and talk to him mom’s wishes be damned.”
“Was I that bad a boyfriend?” he wonders and Max looks over at him with a questioning look. “I mean, no one else has ever said they wished they’d never been born so they wouldn’t have me as an ex so…”
“Did you not listen to what mom and Jenna and Mimi were talking about, or did you mentally check out at the ‘you were ex’s’ thing?” Max’s mouth quirks, like he already knows the answer to that question but is still asking it.
“It wasn’t you that was the problem, it kind of sounds like the guy that would have been Alex’s dad was the problem.”
Michael scowls, he knows Jesse Manes, or at least knows of him. Little stories that the Sheriff and Maria’s mom would talk around, he sounds like he was an okay guy. And the few times that Michael himself has had to interact with him when he helps out around Sander’s place because of boredom the other man has been gruff but kind.
“You don’t have to stay here with me,” Michael says when the silence gets to be too thick.
“I got nowhere else to be,” Max grins at him, Michael just huffs a sigh at him and resumes staring at the house.
*******************************************************
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 9/?
They look they’re sleeping, lined up against the wall, eyes closed and features lax. Though Tripp thinks if he looks hard enough, he can still see the lines in Alex’s face.
“Do they dream in there?” he wonders, he kind of hopes not, even with the tiniest bit of information that Alex has offered them on his life before he came to them has been rife with trauma.
“I don’t remember anything from my time in our pods,” Nora says from behind him.
He straightens, rolling his shoulders and steeling himself for the conversation that Nora wants to have. He’s sure Louise wants to have it as well, but she’s leaving it up to Nora to try and dissuade him from the path that he and Alex have charted for themselves.
“If I asked you to leave it…” she starts and he shakes his head.
“It’s the right thing to do,” he says firmly. “I have to at least try.”
Even if he doesn’t wake Alex to assist, he can’t let his brother continue on as he is. Can’t let Nora end up being imprisoned like a criminal for the simple act of fleeing a dying planet and existing.
“At least leave Alex out of it, let him sleep and wake in a world where he still has a future,” she says, she reaches out to touch his arm, squeezing gently and staring at him. He doesn’t meet her eyes, he’s pretty sure if he goes down this road that means that any chance he might have been able to have with Nora is going to have to be given up.
“I’m going to talk to Harlan,” he says, he knows it’s a futile exercise. But Harlan is his brother, he has to at least make the effort, “maybe I can talk him around, get him to see the other side of this insanity before it’s too late and I won’t ever have to figure out how Alex’s plan is going to work.”
*******************************************************
“I kind of thought you’d just go into my head and pull out any plan that Alex and I had and consider it done,” Tripp says. He’s trying not to focus on the fact that the Abraham had apparently raised a little Alex Manes and that there’s somewhere out there a birth certificate for him that lists him as Alex’s father.
How did he even miss that? Abraham woke him up not too long before Alex that last time, had he timed them waking for after the Alex in this timeline got shuttled back to the past?
He’s going to need to ask for the specifics, because at some point they’re going to need to tell Alex. Abraham says he’s going to tell the young man he considers his grandson, but Tripp also knows that Abraham is going to pull the frail old grandfather card and foist it all off on Tripp.
There better be at least one photo album of baby pictures in this for him.
He’d scowl at Abraham and ask but the other man has gone back into the house to get something to drink and likely determine what the other are talking about.
“Don’t think we didn’t talk about it,” Nora says, “but honestly I didn’t think you were even going to be able to move Alex’s pod by yourself, let alone the two of you actually pull of seeing Project Shepherd scuttled.”
“I thought we were going to leave the pod there, the original plan was to just wake Alex up clear out Caulfield, though it wasn’t officially called that yet, destroy everything we could get our hands of for Shepherd and Alex would go back in the pod before you and Louise even knew he was missing,” Tripp says, he drags a hand over his face.
“So what changed?” Nora sits down in the chair next to him, they’re angled close together.
“Alex, when we thought we were successful in splitting up his folks he convinced me that putting the third pod back with Jenna and Mimi’s would only cause confusion,” Tripp sighs heavily. “You don’t know how much I wish that I’d just sent him off to sleep and had Abraham help me move his pod back in position.”
He looks over at the door where he can see the shadow of figures in the kitchen, Abraham and he thinks Mimi are by the door.
“He says he’s going to be the one to tell Alex but I know he’s going to finagle his way out of it and it’ll fall on my shoulders.”
Nora smiles at him, her gentle amused smile that he’s missed seeing.
“How do you know him?” he asks, and he winces at the stiffness in his voice, he doesn’t look over at her because he doesn’t want to see her silently judging him.
“Abraham?” she asks, she tilts her head to the side and looks over her shoulder at where the door to the house remains shut, “he was a friend of my husbands, Michael’s father… he was with us when we fled, in the chaos of the crash I’m not sure when we all became separated. I wasn’t even aware that he still lived until he appeared with you, Louise never told me…”
He looks over at her and she’s biting her lower lip between her teeth, her expression pensive with a small amount of annoyance.
“It makes me wonder what other things Louise decided were not important enough to share with me.”
*******************************************************
Alex doesn’t want to interrupt them, he spent the several months when they were hiding out in the past originally interrupting every quiet moment the two managed to take.
But he’s tired and he’s getting the wrong side of hungry and even though Jenna has offered to feed him and house him and basically chain him up in her basement until he agrees to whatever she wants from him…
He needs some quiet, he needs the solitude of a hotel room that holds no memories and an hour to sit and breathe.
He also needs to disconnect the prosthetic and take some painkillers with food of some sort.
“I’m going to have Abraham take me to hotel,” he finally pushes the door open and says. Neither of them jump, they both look up like they hadn’t just been talking with heads bent close together smiling gently at each other.
It makes his heart ache a little bit that he kept Tripp from Nora, but once they were done he thought Tripp would go to her, he didn’t think about putting it in writing somewhere that once Shepherd was done, Caulfield was empty and they had successfully managed to keep his parents from having a fourth child…
He probably should have, Tripp is loyal to an extreme that he hadn’t thought possible.
“Hold on,” Tripp says, he pushes himself to his feet, holding out a hand to pull Nora to hers as well. She smiles prettily at him and Alex thinks maybe he didn’t completely ruin things between them.
Maybe they’ll be able to have a future after all.
“You can stay, maybe one of them…” Alex starts and Tripp shakes his head.
“It’s been a long day, I think some food and some sleep and then maybe we plan to meet up again tomorrow and figure out a game plan,” Tripp says, he glances over at Nora and she nods her head in agreement.
“Jesse stopped in to see the Sheriff, asked him to dig into a cousin and uncle he’d never heard of, you should maybe think about familial addresses while you’re here, it might raise an eyebrow if you’re calling the man who’s supposed to be dad, Tripp and Grandpa, Abraham,” Nora says.
“Fit of teenage rebellion that never went away,” Alex waves. “The better question is why are you talking to my... Jesse?”
“I wasn’t, I don’t,” Nora shakes her head. “The Sheriff and I and Michelle sometimes get together to gossip about our sons, other stuff too…. But other stuff has been really quiet, so it’s really mostly centered around the boys right now.”
Alex blinks at her in confusion and she laughs at him.
“Max and Kyle,” she clarifies, “when they came out of the pods I took in all three of them, didn’t make sense to separate them if I didn’t need to.”
*******************************************************
There’s a brief moment before Michael leaves his house to go potentially stalk an ex-boyfriend that has taken great lengths to make sure he doesn’t know any damn thing about him that he thinks about renting a car.
He doesn’t because he’s already running behind schedule but also because he’s hoping that maybe his mom and Jenna and Mimi will be distracted enough by Alex, Tripp and their mysterious third that they won’t clock his truck parked three houses down around the slight bend.
He watches the car pull up and the older gentleman that he doesn’t know get out of the back. The one climbing out from behind the wheel is unmistakably Tripp, he’s older, but he’s still got the same exact look as the man in his mom’s pictures.
It’s the other man, the one that’s having his door opened by the older man with a brace in his hand and Michael frowns as Alex emerges.
And it is Alex, the one he remembers seeing bent over a computer, heads phone on, completely focused on whatever task he was performing at the time.
He looks tired as he braces an arm against the door to steady himself then takes the brace from the other man.
No one had said he’d been injured in some way, not his mom or Jenna or Mimi. Not a single one of them.
He watches as Jenna hugs him first, then Mimi. Then watches them all disappear into the house.
He should march up to that door and demand answers to questions that he doesn’t even know how to phrase properly.
It’s only 45 minutes later when he hears the car pull up behind him, a glance in the rear view mirror shows Max, not in uniform climbing out. He taps on the passenger window and waits patiently while Michael contemplates just ignoring him.
But Max won’t go away and worse he could probably walk right up to Jenna’s door and be let in.
He unlocks the door and Max climbs in, makes himself comfortable, propping and arm against the window and staring at Jenna’s house.
“I’m not doing anything,” Michael says finally, after they sit there in silence for just shy of ten minutes.
“I know,” Max nods, he doesn’t look over at him. “Just Kyle and I were talking about it and it seemed kind of cruel that we all knew you were going to be out here by yourself just watching. Kyle had a shift or he would have come too, I thought about asking Maria and Isobel to come, but they’d probably be just goading you to go up to the house and talk to him mom’s wishes be damned.”
“Was I that bad a boyfriend?” he wonders and Max looks over at him with a questioning look. “I mean, no one else has ever said they wished they’d never been born so they wouldn’t have me as an ex so…”
“Did you not listen to what mom and Jenna and Mimi were talking about, or did you mentally check out at the ‘you were ex’s’ thing?” Max’s mouth quirks, like he already knows the answer to that question but is still asking it.
“It wasn’t you that was the problem, it kind of sounds like the guy that would have been Alex’s dad was the problem.”
Michael scowls, he knows Jesse Manes, or at least knows of him. Little stories that the Sheriff and Maria’s mom would talk around, he sounds like he was an okay guy. And the few times that Michael himself has had to interact with him when he helps out around Sander’s place because of boredom the other man has been gruff but kind.
“You don’t have to stay here with me,” Michael says when the silence gets to be too thick.
“I got nowhere else to be,” Max grins at him, Michael just huffs a sigh at him and resumes staring at the house.
*******************************************************