Chapter Text
"They're my family, Alex!"
"Alright, maybe. But you are mine!"
Alex Manes has the worst fucking timing in the whole world. Solar System. Universe. The worst.
The fire in his eyes, the panic in his voice; both make Michael's eyes bulge with incredulity and frustration. Anger and sorrow. Why is he doing this? He should be running away from the danger! What the fuck is wrong with him? Michael knows Alex is stubborn but did he not learn anything from serving in the fucking Air Force all these goddamn years?!?
"What? No!"
It takes ten years for them to get on the same page and Alex chooses NOW to say he still loves him? Because that's what this is. A declaration. You don't risk getting blown to smithereens for someone you're just trying to be friends with. Michael doesn't see Valenti down here trying to pull him out. To be fair, Michael would've done the same. He would have hightailed it out of here so fast...
No. You risk getting blown to smithereens for someone you love more than your own sense of self-preservation. When you have nothing and no one else to lose. Michael can't be the one who drags Alex down into oblivion with him if he can't break her out in time.
"You gotta go, Alex!"
Alex has a full life ahead of him. With someone who deserves his love. Who's from this fucking planet and isn't being systematically hunted down, experimented on, and exterminated by his douchebag of a father.
"I don't look away, Guerin."
Oh, that's rich, coming from Alex "I'm Just Looking for Any Excuse to Walk Away” Manes. From the boy Michael had fallen in love with at seventeen who promptly disappeared on him for ten years when they could have worked things out in Roswell. The one who came back feeling like three-quarters of a man but still looked whole in Michael's eyes. But no matter how many different ways Michael tells him that from where he stands nothing's changed, Alex can't seem to grasp what Michael means by that for very long. Not with Sarge looking over his shoulder even after all this time. Sometimes Michael thinks they don't actually speak the same language.
"No."
And that was before Alex even found out about the alien stuff. Since then? Fuck. He couldn't even stick around the bunker long enough for Michael to show him the rest of the console and tell him how it feels to be able to touch something from his home. And now Michael's actually found out his family has been on Earth this whole time?! And they couldn't come to get him while he waited in the dark out at Foster's Homestead Ranch all those nights?
"Go!"
Michael just can't anymore. He doesn't know what else he can say to get it through Alex's thick skull that Michael is not worth dying for. Alex has friends and a mother who love him and would miss him terribly if Michael selfishly kept him for himself and they both went down if he couldn't break her out first.
So he lashes out, desperate to get Alex to safety.
"Go! I don't love you!" Michael can see tears brimming in Alex's beautiful brown eyes and he dies a little more inside. "I don't! We've been holding onto this thing." He's basically running on fumes now, "and, what? It's gotten us nowhere."
He needs to go back to trying to break down the door with the fire extinguisher; he needs to get her out of here and he can't do that while worrying about Alex being in harm's way. "Just let go," he sighs wearily, turning away slowly.
Alex's next words call his bluff. Because of course they do.
"You're a miserable liar."
Goddamn stupid stubborn sonofabitch.
He looks as tenacious as he sounds and Michael is just gone. Gone on this wonderful, crazy, infuriating, hurricane of a man who blows into and out of Michael's life with enough force to keep him permanently scrabbling for a foothold on the ground while simultaneously lifting him up to reach for the stars.