FIC: Roswell New Mexico - Lost to Time 19/20
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 19/20
”My mom would be really mad if I was doing that,” Kyle says, he’s been watching the one boy scrawl random symbols and words across the wall. The other one is sitting with his back pressed to the wall to Kyle’s right, arms wrapped around his knees.
The girl who Miss Nora said was called Isobel is standing slightly behind him, she’s got her arms wrapped around herself like it’s cold.
She said the boys were Michael and Max, but she didn’t say which was which so Kyle isn’t sure which one is drawing on the walls and which one is huddled against the wall.
The boy turns and looks at him, staring at him with unblinking dark eyes before he dismisses him and turns back to the wall.
“Do you have paper?” he asks turning slightly and Isobel, bites her lips, nods once and then wanders away. When she comes back minutes later it’s with slightly crumpled printer paper held tightly in her hands.
She offers it to him with a shy smile and he grins at her before he takes them and goes to sit cross-legged beside the boy. Laying the paper out on the floor and turning to look at the selection of crayons and chalk that is piled in front of the boy.
He seems to be drawing in mostly blacks and browns so he selects a blue crayon. The boys hand stops moving and Kyle can see him looking at him out of the corner of his eye. He doesn’t move his arm or try and stop him so Kyle leans over the paper in front of him and draws the sides of a house.
The other one creeps forward slowly, sitting on his knees and looking down at the paper laid out. Kyle picks out a green crayon from the pile and holds it out to him.
“It looks like he’s only using the brown and black ones,” he says and the other boys’ eyes dart at the still one before he reaches out and takes the crayon from him. He looks at what Kyle is drawing and starts copying him, the girl wanders over next, hovering near the one before she lowers herself to the floor beside him.
He starts to hand her a pink crayon but she shakes her head, “I want one like that,” she says looking at the one he clenched in his hands.
He grins at her and picks up one that’s a lighter shade of the one he has and hands it off.
He finishes drawing his house, adding in his mom and dad and himself, pauses for a moment before he adds the dog that his mom has said he can’t have because he’s not old enough yet.
He turns to get a yellow crayon from the pile and stops, the other one has turned from the wall and his on his knees close to him, staring down at the picture he’s drawn like he’s never seen anything like it.
“Its me and my mom and dad, and that’ll be my dog someday when I’m older and mom says I can have one,” he says, he grins and twists. Gathering up the crayons and dropping them in the center of the papers. “You should color with us on the paper, that way your mom can hang them all up on the fridge thing when you’re done.”
The boy’s eyes shift sharply up and when Kyle looks in the same direction, he can see Miss Nora and his dad standing there. Miss Nora has her hand pressed against her mouth and he goes to say sorry about having Isobel take the paper, but his dad shakes his head sharply at him.
The boy looks at the crayon in his hand, then down at the paper, then over his shoulder at the wall and when he turns back his bottom lip is quivering, and he looks like he might start crying. Isobel and the other one have both stopped coloring and are watching him with careful eyes.
“It’s okay Max,” Miss Nora says softly, Max still looks distressed though and Kyle shuffles through the crayons before he finds the yellow one.
“Do you want to color the sun in for me?” he says, he saves the sun for last almost always because coloring with the yellow crayon makes him happy. Probably because it’s bright and cheerful.
Max looks at it for a minute before he drops the black crayon on the floor and takes it from Kyle. His hands are shaking. He shifts closer to Kyle; their shoulders are touching and he turns his head to look at him like he’s wanting direction.
Kyle thinks that they might never have colored before and he resolves the next time that he’ll bring the coloring books that his mom got him because he thinks they might like those.
“I always put it in the middle,” he says, as he takes the green crayon to color in the grass. Isobel and Michael have leaned forward over their own drawings again and Max is carefully making a circle of yellow on the paper as he puts the grass down.
*******************************************************
Max drops Jenna off at Liz’s on his way home. He’s got a random assortment of texts from the time he was with his mom, Tripp and Jenna and though they were all sent individually and not within the group chat he can piece together that somehow Kyle has managed to convince Isobel that a large, splashy, expensive wedding is not them.
He’s not sure how he feels about getting married on the playground of their former elementary school, but the last text from Isobel indicates that she’s already contacted the appropriate people and they’ve given the go ahead.
Plus he’s pretty sure that means he won’t be obligated to wear the tux he hates.
Kyle’s car is already in the driveway, though the house is quiet when he walks in. He locks the door behind him and puts the keys on the hook next to Kyle’s keys.
Kyle is sitting in the middle of their bedroom, a box that he’s only seen a handful of times open to his right.
“Hey,” he says with a smile, “Jenna okay?”
“Will be, dropped her off with Liz,” Max says, sitting on the foot of the bed to pull his boots off, then sliding to the floor behind Kyle. He rests his chin on Kyle’s shoulder, brushing his fingers against his side.
Kyle leans back slightly and turns his head so Max can drag his lips across his cheek.
“What’s this?” he asks, nodding in the direction of the piles of what he’s pretty sure is their shared history.
“Rosa was asking if I still had that marriage certificate from when we were kids,” Kyle murmurs.
“The one her and Maria and Liz drew up?”
“Yeah, was pretty sure if it was still in one piece that it would be in that box of stuff mom gave me when we bought the house I just hadn’t had a chance to dig through it yet, so I figured…”
Kyle leans forward, just enough to pick up a pile of crinkled paper, then settles back more firmly against him. Max presses his lips to the side of his neck, wraps his arms more firmly around him.
“She save everything?” he asks into Kyle’s skin.
“Just the most important stuff, already sent Rosa a picture of the certificate, she says she can do better now which I don’t doubt, but I also told her that I want this to be legal so… she just laughed at me.”
“I offered you the option of eloping,” Max reminds him and Kyle snorts.
“I found this though while I was digging through the box though,” Kyle says and there’s something in the tone of his voice that Max takes to mean he wants Max to look at whatever this particular item is.
It’s a drawing, Max has the barest of memories of actually drawing it. Up until that first meeting with Kyle it had only been Michael and Isobel, mom and Aunt Mimi and Maria. Everyone treating him with kid gloves and soft voices and hands and not being able to articulate out loud what he was thinking or feeling and being so very confused.
He doesn’t remember anything from before they woke up, Michael and Isobel don’t really remember anything either except for their moms. Max doesn’t even have that.
“That’s…” he starts, he links his fingers together across Kyle’s stomach.
“The drawing you did for me, after I let you draw the sun on mine,” Kyle says.
Everything is in yellow, with a little green and some light blue.
Because those were the colors that Kyle handed him that day and Max vaguely remembers not knowing what they were doing or why. He was just copying whatever Kyle did and mom had been standing in the doorway with Kyle’s dad beside her watching and she’d had tears in her eyes.
*******************************************************
Jenna taps on his door while Alex is staring blankly at his laptop and trying to decide if it’s too early to go to bed.
“You look like you’re having thoughts,” Alex says when Jenna sits down across from him.
“Trying to figure out if we made things worse or better,” Jenna shrugs.
“Well it doesn’t look like Isobel married a serial killer so…” Alex says.
“Or if he even ended up a serial killer,” Jenna says, “enough things changed that maybe whatever happened to make him the way he was didn’t happen anymore?”
Alex makes a face that Jenna is mimicking so at least they’re both mostly in alignment on that.
They don’t get that lucky, somewhere out there is a Noah, whether he’s a murderer or not is up for debate but nothing they did should have changed the reality of his existence.
“Kind of wish I had all my old Shepherd files, but even the tiny amount of digging I did into them before,” he waves his hand to indicate the whole time travel into the past shoved into a pod to go back to the future thing, “he wasn’t in there, not held at Caulfield and not even someone that they were actively tracking, nothing that I could find.”
“You guys didn’t save anything when you emptied out the prison this time?” Jenna asks.
“What there was of it, sure, but Caulfield was just barely starting up when dad and I shut it down, not a lot in the way of documentation. Though they did have a lot more tech then we ever found in the original version of it.”
Jenna’s blinking at him and he doesn’t flush at the fact that she’s surprised that he called Tripp, dad.
“Got to get used to it, right?” before he calls Tripp by his name in front of someone who is expecting him to call Tripp, dad. Like his actual birth father.
“Yeah, was something else we need to talk about though,” she says, she sets her phone down in the middle of the table swiping across the screen so he can see her missed calls.
“Eli,” Alex murmurs.
“Yeah, got eight missed calls from him in just the last two days, voice mails are edging on panic and…”
“Eli doesn’t deal well with panic,” Alex finishes, he’s got the same amount of missed calls. Chances are if they line up their phones side by side that he’s been probably trying to contact them one right after the other.
He’s been putting off calling him, trying to sort through memories and hoping to remember enough that it won’t raise red flags for Eli.
“I remember the test phrases for a potential invasion of the body snatchers situation,” Alex says, Jenna just stares at him then shakes her head.
“You have test phrases for a…”
“Potential body snatcher, we never did get around to making ones for alien abductions, probably should rectify that,” Alex says and he grins when Jenna wads up one of the napkins left on the table from the breakfast that he’d eaten with Michael and throws it at him.
“Just for that you get to call and convince him that we’ve not been ignoring him, just had a lot of shit going on.”
*******************************************************
“So if you were taking someone out on a third date where would you go?” Michael asks.
There’s silence on the other end before Maria drawls, “you realized you called me and not Isobel or Max, right?”
“Max didn’t pick up and Isobel hung up on me,” Michael says and he doesn’t need to see Maria to know she’s rolling her eyes at the moment.
“Right,” Maria says, he can hear her moving around on the other end of the phone, “I’m assuming this third date will be with Alex?”
“There’s literally nothing to do in Roswell, but I think if I try to leave Roswell with him that Tripp and Abraham will be in a dark vehicle following us and I really think that’ll ruin any moment we might get to have.”
“You could take him the alien museum, that’s always good for a few laughs…” Maria laughs at Michael’s snort of derision. “You can make a game of all the things they got wrong.”
*******************************************************
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 19/20
”My mom would be really mad if I was doing that,” Kyle says, he’s been watching the one boy scrawl random symbols and words across the wall. The other one is sitting with his back pressed to the wall to Kyle’s right, arms wrapped around his knees.
The girl who Miss Nora said was called Isobel is standing slightly behind him, she’s got her arms wrapped around herself like it’s cold.
She said the boys were Michael and Max, but she didn’t say which was which so Kyle isn’t sure which one is drawing on the walls and which one is huddled against the wall.
The boy turns and looks at him, staring at him with unblinking dark eyes before he dismisses him and turns back to the wall.
“Do you have paper?” he asks turning slightly and Isobel, bites her lips, nods once and then wanders away. When she comes back minutes later it’s with slightly crumpled printer paper held tightly in her hands.
She offers it to him with a shy smile and he grins at her before he takes them and goes to sit cross-legged beside the boy. Laying the paper out on the floor and turning to look at the selection of crayons and chalk that is piled in front of the boy.
He seems to be drawing in mostly blacks and browns so he selects a blue crayon. The boys hand stops moving and Kyle can see him looking at him out of the corner of his eye. He doesn’t move his arm or try and stop him so Kyle leans over the paper in front of him and draws the sides of a house.
The other one creeps forward slowly, sitting on his knees and looking down at the paper laid out. Kyle picks out a green crayon from the pile and holds it out to him.
“It looks like he’s only using the brown and black ones,” he says and the other boys’ eyes dart at the still one before he reaches out and takes the crayon from him. He looks at what Kyle is drawing and starts copying him, the girl wanders over next, hovering near the one before she lowers herself to the floor beside him.
He starts to hand her a pink crayon but she shakes her head, “I want one like that,” she says looking at the one he clenched in his hands.
He grins at her and picks up one that’s a lighter shade of the one he has and hands it off.
He finishes drawing his house, adding in his mom and dad and himself, pauses for a moment before he adds the dog that his mom has said he can’t have because he’s not old enough yet.
He turns to get a yellow crayon from the pile and stops, the other one has turned from the wall and his on his knees close to him, staring down at the picture he’s drawn like he’s never seen anything like it.
“Its me and my mom and dad, and that’ll be my dog someday when I’m older and mom says I can have one,” he says, he grins and twists. Gathering up the crayons and dropping them in the center of the papers. “You should color with us on the paper, that way your mom can hang them all up on the fridge thing when you’re done.”
The boy’s eyes shift sharply up and when Kyle looks in the same direction, he can see Miss Nora and his dad standing there. Miss Nora has her hand pressed against her mouth and he goes to say sorry about having Isobel take the paper, but his dad shakes his head sharply at him.
The boy looks at the crayon in his hand, then down at the paper, then over his shoulder at the wall and when he turns back his bottom lip is quivering, and he looks like he might start crying. Isobel and the other one have both stopped coloring and are watching him with careful eyes.
“It’s okay Max,” Miss Nora says softly, Max still looks distressed though and Kyle shuffles through the crayons before he finds the yellow one.
“Do you want to color the sun in for me?” he says, he saves the sun for last almost always because coloring with the yellow crayon makes him happy. Probably because it’s bright and cheerful.
Max looks at it for a minute before he drops the black crayon on the floor and takes it from Kyle. His hands are shaking. He shifts closer to Kyle; their shoulders are touching and he turns his head to look at him like he’s wanting direction.
Kyle thinks that they might never have colored before and he resolves the next time that he’ll bring the coloring books that his mom got him because he thinks they might like those.
“I always put it in the middle,” he says, as he takes the green crayon to color in the grass. Isobel and Michael have leaned forward over their own drawings again and Max is carefully making a circle of yellow on the paper as he puts the grass down.
*******************************************************
Max drops Jenna off at Liz’s on his way home. He’s got a random assortment of texts from the time he was with his mom, Tripp and Jenna and though they were all sent individually and not within the group chat he can piece together that somehow Kyle has managed to convince Isobel that a large, splashy, expensive wedding is not them.
He’s not sure how he feels about getting married on the playground of their former elementary school, but the last text from Isobel indicates that she’s already contacted the appropriate people and they’ve given the go ahead.
Plus he’s pretty sure that means he won’t be obligated to wear the tux he hates.
Kyle’s car is already in the driveway, though the house is quiet when he walks in. He locks the door behind him and puts the keys on the hook next to Kyle’s keys.
Kyle is sitting in the middle of their bedroom, a box that he’s only seen a handful of times open to his right.
“Hey,” he says with a smile, “Jenna okay?”
“Will be, dropped her off with Liz,” Max says, sitting on the foot of the bed to pull his boots off, then sliding to the floor behind Kyle. He rests his chin on Kyle’s shoulder, brushing his fingers against his side.
Kyle leans back slightly and turns his head so Max can drag his lips across his cheek.
“What’s this?” he asks, nodding in the direction of the piles of what he’s pretty sure is their shared history.
“Rosa was asking if I still had that marriage certificate from when we were kids,” Kyle murmurs.
“The one her and Maria and Liz drew up?”
“Yeah, was pretty sure if it was still in one piece that it would be in that box of stuff mom gave me when we bought the house I just hadn’t had a chance to dig through it yet, so I figured…”
Kyle leans forward, just enough to pick up a pile of crinkled paper, then settles back more firmly against him. Max presses his lips to the side of his neck, wraps his arms more firmly around him.
“She save everything?” he asks into Kyle’s skin.
“Just the most important stuff, already sent Rosa a picture of the certificate, she says she can do better now which I don’t doubt, but I also told her that I want this to be legal so… she just laughed at me.”
“I offered you the option of eloping,” Max reminds him and Kyle snorts.
“I found this though while I was digging through the box though,” Kyle says and there’s something in the tone of his voice that Max takes to mean he wants Max to look at whatever this particular item is.
It’s a drawing, Max has the barest of memories of actually drawing it. Up until that first meeting with Kyle it had only been Michael and Isobel, mom and Aunt Mimi and Maria. Everyone treating him with kid gloves and soft voices and hands and not being able to articulate out loud what he was thinking or feeling and being so very confused.
He doesn’t remember anything from before they woke up, Michael and Isobel don’t really remember anything either except for their moms. Max doesn’t even have that.
“That’s…” he starts, he links his fingers together across Kyle’s stomach.
“The drawing you did for me, after I let you draw the sun on mine,” Kyle says.
Everything is in yellow, with a little green and some light blue.
Because those were the colors that Kyle handed him that day and Max vaguely remembers not knowing what they were doing or why. He was just copying whatever Kyle did and mom had been standing in the doorway with Kyle’s dad beside her watching and she’d had tears in her eyes.
*******************************************************
Jenna taps on his door while Alex is staring blankly at his laptop and trying to decide if it’s too early to go to bed.
“You look like you’re having thoughts,” Alex says when Jenna sits down across from him.
“Trying to figure out if we made things worse or better,” Jenna shrugs.
“Well it doesn’t look like Isobel married a serial killer so…” Alex says.
“Or if he even ended up a serial killer,” Jenna says, “enough things changed that maybe whatever happened to make him the way he was didn’t happen anymore?”
Alex makes a face that Jenna is mimicking so at least they’re both mostly in alignment on that.
They don’t get that lucky, somewhere out there is a Noah, whether he’s a murderer or not is up for debate but nothing they did should have changed the reality of his existence.
“Kind of wish I had all my old Shepherd files, but even the tiny amount of digging I did into them before,” he waves his hand to indicate the whole time travel into the past shoved into a pod to go back to the future thing, “he wasn’t in there, not held at Caulfield and not even someone that they were actively tracking, nothing that I could find.”
“You guys didn’t save anything when you emptied out the prison this time?” Jenna asks.
“What there was of it, sure, but Caulfield was just barely starting up when dad and I shut it down, not a lot in the way of documentation. Though they did have a lot more tech then we ever found in the original version of it.”
Jenna’s blinking at him and he doesn’t flush at the fact that she’s surprised that he called Tripp, dad.
“Got to get used to it, right?” before he calls Tripp by his name in front of someone who is expecting him to call Tripp, dad. Like his actual birth father.
“Yeah, was something else we need to talk about though,” she says, she sets her phone down in the middle of the table swiping across the screen so he can see her missed calls.
“Eli,” Alex murmurs.
“Yeah, got eight missed calls from him in just the last two days, voice mails are edging on panic and…”
“Eli doesn’t deal well with panic,” Alex finishes, he’s got the same amount of missed calls. Chances are if they line up their phones side by side that he’s been probably trying to contact them one right after the other.
He’s been putting off calling him, trying to sort through memories and hoping to remember enough that it won’t raise red flags for Eli.
“I remember the test phrases for a potential invasion of the body snatchers situation,” Alex says, Jenna just stares at him then shakes her head.
“You have test phrases for a…”
“Potential body snatcher, we never did get around to making ones for alien abductions, probably should rectify that,” Alex says and he grins when Jenna wads up one of the napkins left on the table from the breakfast that he’d eaten with Michael and throws it at him.
“Just for that you get to call and convince him that we’ve not been ignoring him, just had a lot of shit going on.”
*******************************************************
“So if you were taking someone out on a third date where would you go?” Michael asks.
There’s silence on the other end before Maria drawls, “you realized you called me and not Isobel or Max, right?”
“Max didn’t pick up and Isobel hung up on me,” Michael says and he doesn’t need to see Maria to know she’s rolling her eyes at the moment.
“Right,” Maria says, he can hear her moving around on the other end of the phone, “I’m assuming this third date will be with Alex?”
“There’s literally nothing to do in Roswell, but I think if I try to leave Roswell with him that Tripp and Abraham will be in a dark vehicle following us and I really think that’ll ruin any moment we might get to have.”
“You could take him the alien museum, that’s always good for a few laughs…” Maria laughs at Michael’s snort of derision. “You can make a game of all the things they got wrong.”
*******************************************************