Chapter Text
upset
“It’s a locust,” Maria said as the large insect landed on her arm. “Alex was looking for these before he went missing.”
Michael, standing behind them, wondering what they were doing out in the middle of the desert, blinked hard hearing those words, hoped beyond hope he’d heard them wrong. Then asked, “What do you mean Alex went missing?”
Maria and Rosa jumped, startling the locust into flying away. The two women spun around to face him, guilt written all over their faces. It was all the confirmation he needed that he hadn’t misheard, and his heart sank into the pit of his stomach.
“Michael!” Rosa gasped, looking to Maria for guidance on how to handle the situation.
“What do you mean Alex is missing?” he repeated, grinding out the words between clenched teeth.
“You know those messages I thought were coming from my mom? The paprika spilling over and the poster falling off your wall? I’ve had more things like that happen, and I realized last night that the messages are coming from Alex,” Maria explained quickly.
Alex, from whom Michael had heard nothing for nearly two weeks. Alex, who had a sat phone so it didn’t matter that he was in the middle of nowhere with no signal. Alex, who would have called Michael, no matter how busy or tired he was, especially once he heard Michael was sick. Alex, his Alex, was now apparently sending messages to Maria, as if he were a ghost. Fuck, no. It couldn’t be. Alex couldn’t be gone. He just couldn’t. He’d promised Michael he’d come home to him. He’d promised!
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” Michael demanded when he was finally able to force words out of the tightness in his throat.
“We didn’t want you to be upset,” Maria said, and Rosa flinched but didn’t say anything.
Michael just stared at Maria in disbelief for a minute. “Upset?! Are you fucking kidding me? You didn’t want me to be upset? The man I love is missing. The man I’ve been in love with for every minute of my life since I was seventeen. The man I’m living with. The man I fully intend to marry one day. Is missing. Sending you messages like he’s a damn ghost. And you didn’t want me to be fucking upset? I’m so far beyond upset you can’t even imagine. I’d be upset if you broke my guitar. I’d be upset if you crashed my truck. I’m not upset. I’m furious you decided you had the right to keep this from me. I’m terrified to the depths of my soul that I’m never going to see Alex again. And I’m going to tear apart piece by piece anyone who dared to lay a finger on Alex.”
“Fine, I’m sorry I implied you’d be upset when clearly you’re going ballistic,” Maria said, and the slightly snarky tone in her voice snapped the last bit of Michael’s control.
He got in her face, feeling a sense of grim satisfaction when she tried to back away from him. He followed, pressing a finger into her chest to emphasize every sentence as he promised, “I’m gonna burn the fucking world down. Powers or no. Support from friends and family or no. And if you get in my way, DeLuca, you’d better believe I’ll go right through you. All that matters to me is Alex.”
“Michael,” Rosa said softly. It was the sympathy in her tone that convinced him to tear his glare away from Maria, the remorse clear in her expression that allowed him to calm just enough to hear what she had to say. “We wanted to find something to bring to you. We wanted to have some idea of what happened to him first. We wanted to be able to give you hope at the same time we gave you the bad news.”
And Michael deflated. He was still furious. At himself for not realizing something was wrong sooner. At his family and friends. He still wanted to murder anyone and everyone who had made the decision to keep this from him. He still intended to burn the world down and get Alex back, and barring that, destroy every single person who had ever harmed Alex before allowing himself to be swallowed up by the flames.
But for now, in the face of Rosa’s gentle statement, it was like his strings were cut, and Michael collapsed to the desert floor with a primal yell of despair. He dug his fingers into the cracked desert ground and let out scream after scream until his voice broke. He felt the tears pouring down his cheeks, falling onto the dry broken earth. Something inside of him shattered, and he wasn’t sure it would ever be mended again.
“Michael,” Rosa’s gentle voice made its way to him through his broken sobbing. He felt a soft hand on his shoulder. “Michael, open your eyes.”
He did, saw nothing through the blur of his tears at first, but then there was a splash of yellow that hadn’t been there. He did his best to blink the still flowing tears from his vision and saw a small daffodil growing from the ground in front of him.
“What?” he croaked. “Alex?” he asked hopefully, looking up at Maria.
She shook her head. “I don’t think he could do that.”
Michael felt the tiny bit of hope extinguished and wanted to rip the flower from the earth.
“Michael,” Rosa said, pulling his attention back to her, “I’m pretty sure that was you. Didn’t your mom have the power to make crops grow?”
He nodded. “But I never had that power, and I don’t have any powers now.”
“I don’t think that’s true anymore, Michael. When you collapsed the entire desert shook. It felt like an earthquake. Try.”
He raised his hand and focused on Rosa’s necklace. It took way more effort than it should have, but it lifted into the air. He laughed a humorless laugh. Of course, now that he’d lost the only thing he couldn’t live without, now that he was broken beyond repair, his powers would return.
But then Rosa gasped and pointed back to the daffodil. Michael couldn’t find it in himself to care about this new ability he’d apparently inherited from his mother, not now, but when he looked back at the dirt in front of him, he saw a locust sitting on the daffodil. As he watched, another came and joined it. Then another, and another. “Maria?” he asked, hardly daring to hope.
“It’s possible. It might be another message from Alex. It’s part of what he was investigating while looking for those weather balloons, right?” she asked.
Michael nodded as he reached out a shaky hand towards the flower. A locust flew off of the flower to land on his hand.
“Daffodils can be symbols of hope,” Maria said softly.
Michael allowed fresh tears to escape as he felt hope flow in to fill in the cracks in his soul, holding him together just enough for him to get to his feet. The locust stayed with him, and although he felt idiotic doing so, he spoke to the large bug in his palm. “Alex, if you can hear me. I’m coming for you. I’m going to find you and bring you home if it’s the last thing I do. I swear it.”
The locust flew off then, and Michael curled his hand into a fist. He focused on Alex, on his love for him, on his desperate need to find him, and managed to light his fist on fire. His lips curled up into what he was sure was a menacing grin, and then he turned to Rosa and Maria. “What now? Or am I still too upset to be informed of your plans for finding Alex?” he asked with a sneer and a glare at Maria who eyed his flaming fist with a satisfying amount of unease.
“We were trying to retrace his steps, follow the weather balloons until we found some sign of him,” Maria said. “Liz is figuring out the scientific explanation for how he’s reaching out. One that doesn’t include him being…”
Michael extinguished his hand, reached to clutch his necklace. “He’s not. He’s not gone. And I’m going to find him.”