FIC: Roswell New Mexico - Lost to Time 17/?
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 17/?
She’s not as young as she used to be, making the trip out to the caves to check on the children and Nora’s pods takes more effort each time.
But it’s also a task that she’s not willing to hand off to someone else.
She’ll keep making the trip until it’s time for Nora to wake and help her prepare for the children to wake.
“Did you check the house too?” Anna asks when she gets back and Louise doesn’t respond. She doesn’t need to. They both know she didn’t.
“You put such faith in the soldier man, where has that faith gotten us? Scattered to the winds and most of us dead,” Anna grumbles, there’s an edge to her voice and Louise understands… she does as much as the others think she and Nora don’t.
“Abraham will do what needs to be done,” she says firmly and Anna narrows her eyes at her. “He will. He knows how important it is.”
“You say this like he’s the only one we need to worry about,” Anna states. “He’s not alone, and he’s not setting the path forward. What has already changed with the shutting of the prison they kept us in, those won’t be the only changes,” she says forebodingly.
Louise sighs and Anna just stares at her, like Louise has any control over Abraham or Alex or even Tripp.
Maybe Nora would have been able to force Tripp to see reason if they’d had more time together; but that fragile bond between them is stretched thin and Louise thinks that as much as Tripp seemed to adore Nora, would have loved her beyond measure if given more time… Louise thinks that in Alex Tripp sees family that he can trust in.
*******************************************************
Max appears with Jenna in tow shortly after Michael has gone to eat breakfast with Alex and Tripp is looking marginally more human with two cups of coffee and some toast in him.
“You had a heartier constitution before,” she says when Max appears in the doorway to the kitchen, arm over Jenna’s shoulder. She’s got her bag over her shoulder and her planner clutched to her chest.
“Abraham laughs, but he says it’s because of the time spent was spent in the pods, if I tried to smoke a cigarette now I’d probably die coughing,” Tripp grumbles, he looks so put out but Nora can’t even remember if she ever saw him with a cigarette either in hand or on his person.
“Good morning,” she says as Max leans down to press a kiss to her cheek. “Were you coming by today?”
“There was a thing, Jenna wanted to talk to you,” Max shrugs, he looks at the mostly empty coffee pot then back at her and she only raises her eyebrows, it’s not like he doesn’t know how to make it and she’s certainly not forcing Tripp to navigate a kitchen he’s unused to in order to make a fresh one.
Jenna sits down in the chair closest to Tripp, it amused her sometimes how both Alex and Jenna had latched onto Tripp. When she’d learned that Jenna had been military; like Alex, like Tripp she’d wondered if it wasn’t like being drawn to like.
“Is this about whatever happened at the Wild Pony last night?” she asks and both Max and Jenna look at her in surprise. “This is Michael’s house, he lives here,” she says. “And what’s this I hear about you’re getting married on a playground?”
Max stares at her and starts patting at his pockets for his phone.
“I’m picking at you,” she says and Max scowls at her, “both Rosa is very much pushing for something there.”
“Kyle and I talked about it and we’re not opposed, but also Isobel is really focused on doing something that’s going to have us dressed to the nines,” Max makes a face and she laughs at him. “We’d look really out of place on the playground if we can’t get out of the straight jackets…” Max shrugs and turns back to the coffee.
“I think we kind of figured he wouldn’t leave the hotel when he dropped Alex off,” Jenna says.
“I wonder if they were like this the first time around,” Max wonders out loud and Nora can see Jenna shaking her head.
“They were… volatile,” she says, the planner is laying in front of her and she has her fingers linked together over the top of it. “I don’t know what happened when they were younger, but it was like they just couldn’t get past it, or something… guess it don’t really matter much now… since none of that happened.”
“Anyway,” Nora says, to steer the conversation away from an Alex and Michael relationship that doesn’t exist anymore, she has fingers and toes crossed that if they choose to go down a path together that it will be a smoother one filled with much less debris in their way.
“I remembered something last night,” Jenna says, now that Nora is concentrating on her she can see the way she’s slightly trembling. The way that she’s white under the makeup that she likely put on to hide the fact that she’s not slept or eaten much of anything.
“Michael said, he also said that popular theory in the group text is that you and Alex remembered the same thing, though he also said that Alex didn’t share what it was.”
“It was meeting each other, here,” Jenna pauses, licks her lips and then lets out a slow even breath. “We were eight…” Jenna looks at her and she looks so troubled, Nora wishes she knew the words that would make her less so. “We didn’t meet when we were eight, we met 20 years after that.”
“Jenna…” Nora starts and Jenna shakes her head, opens her planner up and pushes the whole thing at her.
She can see the pictures right on top, there’s a little blond girl with her hair in messy pigtails, a dark haired boy standing to her right and another boy with rust colored hair to her left.
“That’s Alex,” Tripp says softly, “I don’t know the other boy, but that one,” he taps his fingers against the dark haired boys face, “that boy is Alex I recognize his face from the scrapbook that Abraham kept of him.”
“Alex and Eli,” Jenna says, she sounds troubled. “That’s Alex and Eli and me, at eight, I didn’t know Alex at eight.”
“But apparently here, you did,” Nora says, “have you lost memories or just gained the ones the you of here would have had?”
“You’re talking like we’re the same person,” Jenna says. “We’re not, we’re…”
“The same person,” Nora says gently, she reaches past Tripp and lays her hand gently over the top of Jenna’s. “You are her, she was you, there’s not some alternate version of the universe out there that now has a Jenna Cameron running around who was here and is now there, there is only here and there is only you now.”
“Am I going to forget the other one?” Jenna asks in a shaky voice and Nora shakes her head.
“No, you’ll remember then because you lived through that then, but you’ll also remember this then, because she’s you and you are her,” Nora says softly, she wants to add ‘this is all hypothetical because this had actually never happened before’ but she’s honestly afraid if she does they’ll get to watch Jenna have a nervous breakdown in real time.
*******************************************************
Michael tries to be quick, but he’s thwarted at every turn by people being out and about and in line in front of him without knowing what they actually want.
Almost forty-five minutes passes before he makes it back to Alex’s room. He has the keycard, Alex had trusted him with his keycard his inner sixteen-year-old squeals, he still taps softly on the door before he uses it to let himself in.
He’d kind of half expected to come back and find Alex passed out in the bed from sheer exhaustion, but he’s awake and dressed, leg re-attached and sitting at the little table in the corner with a little paper cup of coffee to his right.
He looks marginally better, either the shower, a quick catnap or a lot of coffee while he was gone has faded the bruises under his eyes and given him a hint of color in his cheeks.
“What was the point of me giving you the key if you were just going to knock?” he asks and Michael grins at him.
“You could have fallen asleep in the shower and been half-dressed, I was giving you the opportunity to tell me to give you a minute,” Michael says as he taps the door closed with his foot.
Alex looks completely unimpressed but there’s still the hints of exhaustion lingering in his eyes. Michael thinks if he met other him in a dark alley, he’d probably have to kick his ass.
“So I didn’t know what you’d want, so little bit of everything plus some of these parfait things that Max and Isobel fight over if given the chance,” Michael says, setting the bags down on the empty end of the table.
“Coffee?” Alex asks, there’s a tiny edge of desperation tinging his voice.
“I got one of the travel container things, figured you’d probably drink both cups if I only brought two back,” he says as he unpacks everything. He shoves the cardboard travel container in Alex’s direction. Alex looks like he might actually break into song or declarations of love, all directed at the container of coffee.
“It’s little single serving packets of instant coffee,” Alex says, he hasn’t even looked at him. “I can normally swallow them down fast enough to get the caffeine kick and ignore the taste, but…”
“You should probably eat something to soak up all that bad coffee then,” Michael decides, splitting the food in half and sitting down in chair next to Alex. He should probably move it so they’re sitting across from each other, likely Alex had it where it was so he could rest his leg on it. He doesn’t and Alex shoots him a look that Michael doesn’t know how to decipher but doesn’t say anything.
They eat mostly in silence, Michael just watches him and Alex stares down at his food like it’ll disappear if he doesn’t pay it his full attention.
It’s a comfortable silence though, kind of nice after meals with his mom and siblings where they spend the majority of it talking over and at one another having multiple separate conversations.
“So what did you find?” Michael asks, when they’re finished eating and Alex is hunched forward in his chair, hands folded around his cup. He hasn’t been keeping track but Michael’s fairly certain that Alex has drank more than half the container of coffee by himself.
“Me, I guess,” Alex says with a shrug, he shifts the laptop screen so Michael can see it, hits a few keys on the keyboard to wake it up and then enters a password with quick enough fingers that Michael thinks it begins with an R and ends with an !.
The internet browser is open on the screen, multiple tabs across the top bar that he doesn’t even try to count. It looks like a Facebook page they’re looking at and when he leans forward he can see that it’s Alex’s Facebook page.
“You don’t even want to know what I had to do to get into it,” Alex mutters, “you would think I would leave myself a hint of some sort.”
The Alex on the screen looks happy, big wide grin across his face and his banner page seems to be a mashup of pictures. He thinks he can see Jenna in a couple of them, as well as several people he doesn’t know as well as the older guy that had been with Alex and Tripp at Jenna’s house.
“He probably had faith you’d get in without much issue,” Michael says absently. Alex seems to have left the page open on the photo albums. They’re all neatly organized by year.
“Was time better served doing other stuff,” Alex says, he glances over Michael’s shoulder at the bed with a wistful expression that Michael ignores for now.
“How long did it take you? Like ten minutes, twenty?”
Alex wrinkles his nose at him and scowls, “ten minutes give or take.”
Michael laughs at him.
“So any of them trigger more flashbacks of the life you lived before you knew you lived it?”
“Couple more with my grandfather,” Alex says, he says it smoothly, more smoothly then the way he’d stumbled over calling Tripp his dad the previous night. “And… he… I used to sit down with the pods and read to us. Some school stuff with Jenna and Eli.”
He looks troubled, sad when Michael looks over at him, he takes a chance and reaches out to wrap his hand around the one Alex has resting on the table in front of the laptop. Squeezes gently and waits for the inevitable moment where Alex yanks his hand away… it doesn’t come.
“Is it wrong that I feel guilty that he had this great life, with a family and friends that loved him and I just get to waltz in without doing any of the work and take it over?” he asks and Michael doesn’t really know what to say to that.
He knows what his mom would say, what his mom is likely saying to Jenna right now. That for everything science fiction stories get right there’s a whole slew of shit they get wrong, and the reason that probably her and aunt Louise fought however hard they did against changes Alex was trying to make was because of the simple fact that there is only one timeline.
There is only one universe and every little decision pushes it in a singular direction with any other option that could have been taken dissolving into nothing. They’re probably lucky as hell that Alex does exist, that Alex didn’t succeed in that part of his plan.
“I think the fact that those memories are becoming your memories mean that this is your life now,” Michael says softly and the look in Alex’s eyes when he looks at him is one filled with barely disguised hope.
“Really?”
“I mean I can take you to my mom and she can give you her ninety minute lecture on how alternate universes are not a thing that exists and all the reasoning both science and otherwise behind it but I was kind of hoping that you’d maybe show me pictures of you as a cute kid and we can talk about what our options are for a third date?”
“How are we at a third date?” Alex finally asks after he spends a long thirty seconds just staring at him with mouth slightly agape.
“Lunch with Isobel and Jenna,” he ticks off with one finger, “breakfast,” he waves his hand at the remains of their meal on the table.
“I don’t think those can be really considered dates,” Alex says, he’s got a bit of color in his cheeks and there’s a hint of a smile on his lips, it also hasn’t escaped Michael’s notice that Alex still hasn’t pulled his hand away so they’re kind of holding hands at the moment which is making him sort of giddy.
“Well I’m counting them,” he shrugs like it doesn’t mean a damn thing. “If you want to argue about it we can do that on our third date.”
*******************************************************
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 17/?
She’s not as young as she used to be, making the trip out to the caves to check on the children and Nora’s pods takes more effort each time.
But it’s also a task that she’s not willing to hand off to someone else.
She’ll keep making the trip until it’s time for Nora to wake and help her prepare for the children to wake.
“Did you check the house too?” Anna asks when she gets back and Louise doesn’t respond. She doesn’t need to. They both know she didn’t.
“You put such faith in the soldier man, where has that faith gotten us? Scattered to the winds and most of us dead,” Anna grumbles, there’s an edge to her voice and Louise understands… she does as much as the others think she and Nora don’t.
“Abraham will do what needs to be done,” she says firmly and Anna narrows her eyes at her. “He will. He knows how important it is.”
“You say this like he’s the only one we need to worry about,” Anna states. “He’s not alone, and he’s not setting the path forward. What has already changed with the shutting of the prison they kept us in, those won’t be the only changes,” she says forebodingly.
Louise sighs and Anna just stares at her, like Louise has any control over Abraham or Alex or even Tripp.
Maybe Nora would have been able to force Tripp to see reason if they’d had more time together; but that fragile bond between them is stretched thin and Louise thinks that as much as Tripp seemed to adore Nora, would have loved her beyond measure if given more time… Louise thinks that in Alex Tripp sees family that he can trust in.
*******************************************************
Max appears with Jenna in tow shortly after Michael has gone to eat breakfast with Alex and Tripp is looking marginally more human with two cups of coffee and some toast in him.
“You had a heartier constitution before,” she says when Max appears in the doorway to the kitchen, arm over Jenna’s shoulder. She’s got her bag over her shoulder and her planner clutched to her chest.
“Abraham laughs, but he says it’s because of the time spent was spent in the pods, if I tried to smoke a cigarette now I’d probably die coughing,” Tripp grumbles, he looks so put out but Nora can’t even remember if she ever saw him with a cigarette either in hand or on his person.
“Good morning,” she says as Max leans down to press a kiss to her cheek. “Were you coming by today?”
“There was a thing, Jenna wanted to talk to you,” Max shrugs, he looks at the mostly empty coffee pot then back at her and she only raises her eyebrows, it’s not like he doesn’t know how to make it and she’s certainly not forcing Tripp to navigate a kitchen he’s unused to in order to make a fresh one.
Jenna sits down in the chair closest to Tripp, it amused her sometimes how both Alex and Jenna had latched onto Tripp. When she’d learned that Jenna had been military; like Alex, like Tripp she’d wondered if it wasn’t like being drawn to like.
“Is this about whatever happened at the Wild Pony last night?” she asks and both Max and Jenna look at her in surprise. “This is Michael’s house, he lives here,” she says. “And what’s this I hear about you’re getting married on a playground?”
Max stares at her and starts patting at his pockets for his phone.
“I’m picking at you,” she says and Max scowls at her, “both Rosa is very much pushing for something there.”
“Kyle and I talked about it and we’re not opposed, but also Isobel is really focused on doing something that’s going to have us dressed to the nines,” Max makes a face and she laughs at him. “We’d look really out of place on the playground if we can’t get out of the straight jackets…” Max shrugs and turns back to the coffee.
“I think we kind of figured he wouldn’t leave the hotel when he dropped Alex off,” Jenna says.
“I wonder if they were like this the first time around,” Max wonders out loud and Nora can see Jenna shaking her head.
“They were… volatile,” she says, the planner is laying in front of her and she has her fingers linked together over the top of it. “I don’t know what happened when they were younger, but it was like they just couldn’t get past it, or something… guess it don’t really matter much now… since none of that happened.”
“Anyway,” Nora says, to steer the conversation away from an Alex and Michael relationship that doesn’t exist anymore, she has fingers and toes crossed that if they choose to go down a path together that it will be a smoother one filled with much less debris in their way.
“I remembered something last night,” Jenna says, now that Nora is concentrating on her she can see the way she’s slightly trembling. The way that she’s white under the makeup that she likely put on to hide the fact that she’s not slept or eaten much of anything.
“Michael said, he also said that popular theory in the group text is that you and Alex remembered the same thing, though he also said that Alex didn’t share what it was.”
“It was meeting each other, here,” Jenna pauses, licks her lips and then lets out a slow even breath. “We were eight…” Jenna looks at her and she looks so troubled, Nora wishes she knew the words that would make her less so. “We didn’t meet when we were eight, we met 20 years after that.”
“Jenna…” Nora starts and Jenna shakes her head, opens her planner up and pushes the whole thing at her.
She can see the pictures right on top, there’s a little blond girl with her hair in messy pigtails, a dark haired boy standing to her right and another boy with rust colored hair to her left.
“That’s Alex,” Tripp says softly, “I don’t know the other boy, but that one,” he taps his fingers against the dark haired boys face, “that boy is Alex I recognize his face from the scrapbook that Abraham kept of him.”
“Alex and Eli,” Jenna says, she sounds troubled. “That’s Alex and Eli and me, at eight, I didn’t know Alex at eight.”
“But apparently here, you did,” Nora says, “have you lost memories or just gained the ones the you of here would have had?”
“You’re talking like we’re the same person,” Jenna says. “We’re not, we’re…”
“The same person,” Nora says gently, she reaches past Tripp and lays her hand gently over the top of Jenna’s. “You are her, she was you, there’s not some alternate version of the universe out there that now has a Jenna Cameron running around who was here and is now there, there is only here and there is only you now.”
“Am I going to forget the other one?” Jenna asks in a shaky voice and Nora shakes her head.
“No, you’ll remember then because you lived through that then, but you’ll also remember this then, because she’s you and you are her,” Nora says softly, she wants to add ‘this is all hypothetical because this had actually never happened before’ but she’s honestly afraid if she does they’ll get to watch Jenna have a nervous breakdown in real time.
*******************************************************
Michael tries to be quick, but he’s thwarted at every turn by people being out and about and in line in front of him without knowing what they actually want.
Almost forty-five minutes passes before he makes it back to Alex’s room. He has the keycard, Alex had trusted him with his keycard his inner sixteen-year-old squeals, he still taps softly on the door before he uses it to let himself in.
He’d kind of half expected to come back and find Alex passed out in the bed from sheer exhaustion, but he’s awake and dressed, leg re-attached and sitting at the little table in the corner with a little paper cup of coffee to his right.
He looks marginally better, either the shower, a quick catnap or a lot of coffee while he was gone has faded the bruises under his eyes and given him a hint of color in his cheeks.
“What was the point of me giving you the key if you were just going to knock?” he asks and Michael grins at him.
“You could have fallen asleep in the shower and been half-dressed, I was giving you the opportunity to tell me to give you a minute,” Michael says as he taps the door closed with his foot.
Alex looks completely unimpressed but there’s still the hints of exhaustion lingering in his eyes. Michael thinks if he met other him in a dark alley, he’d probably have to kick his ass.
“So I didn’t know what you’d want, so little bit of everything plus some of these parfait things that Max and Isobel fight over if given the chance,” Michael says, setting the bags down on the empty end of the table.
“Coffee?” Alex asks, there’s a tiny edge of desperation tinging his voice.
“I got one of the travel container things, figured you’d probably drink both cups if I only brought two back,” he says as he unpacks everything. He shoves the cardboard travel container in Alex’s direction. Alex looks like he might actually break into song or declarations of love, all directed at the container of coffee.
“It’s little single serving packets of instant coffee,” Alex says, he hasn’t even looked at him. “I can normally swallow them down fast enough to get the caffeine kick and ignore the taste, but…”
“You should probably eat something to soak up all that bad coffee then,” Michael decides, splitting the food in half and sitting down in chair next to Alex. He should probably move it so they’re sitting across from each other, likely Alex had it where it was so he could rest his leg on it. He doesn’t and Alex shoots him a look that Michael doesn’t know how to decipher but doesn’t say anything.
They eat mostly in silence, Michael just watches him and Alex stares down at his food like it’ll disappear if he doesn’t pay it his full attention.
It’s a comfortable silence though, kind of nice after meals with his mom and siblings where they spend the majority of it talking over and at one another having multiple separate conversations.
“So what did you find?” Michael asks, when they’re finished eating and Alex is hunched forward in his chair, hands folded around his cup. He hasn’t been keeping track but Michael’s fairly certain that Alex has drank more than half the container of coffee by himself.
“Me, I guess,” Alex says with a shrug, he shifts the laptop screen so Michael can see it, hits a few keys on the keyboard to wake it up and then enters a password with quick enough fingers that Michael thinks it begins with an R and ends with an !.
The internet browser is open on the screen, multiple tabs across the top bar that he doesn’t even try to count. It looks like a Facebook page they’re looking at and when he leans forward he can see that it’s Alex’s Facebook page.
“You don’t even want to know what I had to do to get into it,” Alex mutters, “you would think I would leave myself a hint of some sort.”
The Alex on the screen looks happy, big wide grin across his face and his banner page seems to be a mashup of pictures. He thinks he can see Jenna in a couple of them, as well as several people he doesn’t know as well as the older guy that had been with Alex and Tripp at Jenna’s house.
“He probably had faith you’d get in without much issue,” Michael says absently. Alex seems to have left the page open on the photo albums. They’re all neatly organized by year.
“Was time better served doing other stuff,” Alex says, he glances over Michael’s shoulder at the bed with a wistful expression that Michael ignores for now.
“How long did it take you? Like ten minutes, twenty?”
Alex wrinkles his nose at him and scowls, “ten minutes give or take.”
Michael laughs at him.
“So any of them trigger more flashbacks of the life you lived before you knew you lived it?”
“Couple more with my grandfather,” Alex says, he says it smoothly, more smoothly then the way he’d stumbled over calling Tripp his dad the previous night. “And… he… I used to sit down with the pods and read to us. Some school stuff with Jenna and Eli.”
He looks troubled, sad when Michael looks over at him, he takes a chance and reaches out to wrap his hand around the one Alex has resting on the table in front of the laptop. Squeezes gently and waits for the inevitable moment where Alex yanks his hand away… it doesn’t come.
“Is it wrong that I feel guilty that he had this great life, with a family and friends that loved him and I just get to waltz in without doing any of the work and take it over?” he asks and Michael doesn’t really know what to say to that.
He knows what his mom would say, what his mom is likely saying to Jenna right now. That for everything science fiction stories get right there’s a whole slew of shit they get wrong, and the reason that probably her and aunt Louise fought however hard they did against changes Alex was trying to make was because of the simple fact that there is only one timeline.
There is only one universe and every little decision pushes it in a singular direction with any other option that could have been taken dissolving into nothing. They’re probably lucky as hell that Alex does exist, that Alex didn’t succeed in that part of his plan.
“I think the fact that those memories are becoming your memories mean that this is your life now,” Michael says softly and the look in Alex’s eyes when he looks at him is one filled with barely disguised hope.
“Really?”
“I mean I can take you to my mom and she can give you her ninety minute lecture on how alternate universes are not a thing that exists and all the reasoning both science and otherwise behind it but I was kind of hoping that you’d maybe show me pictures of you as a cute kid and we can talk about what our options are for a third date?”
“How are we at a third date?” Alex finally asks after he spends a long thirty seconds just staring at him with mouth slightly agape.
“Lunch with Isobel and Jenna,” he ticks off with one finger, “breakfast,” he waves his hand at the remains of their meal on the table.
“I don’t think those can be really considered dates,” Alex says, he’s got a bit of color in his cheeks and there’s a hint of a smile on his lips, it also hasn’t escaped Michael’s notice that Alex still hasn’t pulled his hand away so they’re kind of holding hands at the moment which is making him sort of giddy.
“Well I’m counting them,” he shrugs like it doesn’t mean a damn thing. “If you want to argue about it we can do that on our third date.”
*******************************************************