Chapter Text
Have you ever had the craziest idea that leaves you both excited and nervous at the same time? Like it seems like such a great idea at the time but you know it could get you in such deep shit that you couldn’t find your way out of it if you tried?
That’s how Michael is feeling right now looking at Alex’s apartment door in Santa Fe. He had decided to come up for the week willy nilly a month after they reconnected back in Roswell.
They’ve been texting and talking over the phone (some PG moments, others not-so-PG moments) and Michael has been loving it. It’s been fantastic and great, and everything he’s ever wanted between the two of them because they’ve gotten to know one another through them.
He knows now that Alex is a crazy amazing mechanic who is self-taught on how to fix things through just working problems out on his own, he knows that Adrian is attending the University of New Mexico and Alex is nervous about him being out on his own, and he knows that Alex is a terrible empty nester because he’s up all hours of the night banging around since Adrian didn’t know what the word “quiet” meant.
And now Michael is here, on the other side of the door, with his nerves eating away at him.
It’s like looking at an equation that he doesn’t know how to solve when he’s finally come face-to-face with it. He doesn’t know if he should run away with his tail between his legs or knock on the door and hope Alex greets him warmly.
Though, Michael didn’t give any prior notice to him actually coming…
Needing no other prompting, Michael reaches for the door handle and finds that it’s locked.
That’s the moment Michael starts to panic as he tries to think of a way to let himself in without using his powers, but the more he panics, the more he realizes that he has no other option than to break into the apartment.
He whines as he grasps the door handle again and uses his powers to unlock the door from the outside hoping beyond hope that Alex really is in bed this early in the morning and not sitting just beyond the door waiting to catch him in the act as he blatantly lets himself into his former boyfriend's apartment.
Taking a deep breath, he opens the door to find a dark and empty living room. Alex wasn’t sitting there in the dark waiting for him like some super spy that’d just been waiting to catch him in the act either so it feels a bit anticlimactic, but also terribly relieving to Michael’s nerves as he shuts the door behind him and relocks it.
He silently looks around trying to get his bearings as he sees the kitchen off to the right in the back, the living room right in front of him, and then the dining room off to the left in the back. It was modest and spacious at the same time. It was well lived in with all the mix-matched furniture that was strewn around as Michael walked around it in the dark in order to get to the short hallway set snuggly between the kitchen and dining area.
The short hallway boasted three doors, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. The bathroom was a full one with a shower/bathtub combo at the far end, the toilet and sink are on the left side of the room and it was decorated with all manner of things on the sink that spoke of one person trying to live as two.
The first bedroom was undoubtedly Adrian’s as it spoke of a kid that had the best education that money could buy while also showing his interest in mechanics in the blueprints hanging from all four walls of cars, the first spaceship, and a submarine of all things. This kid was definitely someone Michael should’ve gotten to know better before he went off to University.
Now, however, he turned his interests towards the bedroom at the end of the hallway.
That one is Alex’s, it has to be.
As Michael opened the door as silently as he could, he saw the love of his life asleep under his blanket looking peaceful.
It has Michael just standing there wondering if he was actually there or if this was some sort of sick Twilight Zone episode where Alex will automatically wake up and have empty eye sockets which will then hypnotize him to make him dance around like a monkey with marionette strings attached to his wrists and ankles.
“I can hear you thinking from here” Alex grumbles before he switches his position to his back just to pat the opposite side of the bed lazily seeming to just starfish out on the bed.
Spell and horrific imagery broken, Michael walks into the room and to the opposite side of Alex’s bed where he sits in order to take off the flannel he has over the white shirt he’s wearing underneath and then proceeds to take off his pants and boots as well leaving him in nothing but the white shirt and his black boxer briefs.
Michael doesn’t know how tired he actually is until he slips under the blankets and into Alex’s arms.
The horrific images die away, his panic slips into silence, and all of the thoughts in his head seem to go quiet as he goes into Alex’s waiting embrace.
Damn does being this close feel good. Everything just seems to slot into place when he’s around Alex.
His body temperature seems to have a negative effect on Alex though as the black-haired man scrunches up his face and kicks off the blanket and sheet which seems to do little for him.
If Michael pulls them both back up and turns on the portable air conditioner in the corner telekinetically, well, Alex’s eyes aren’t open so he remains none the wiser, and it seems to help him in the end as he eases back into sleep.
Whatever Michael can do for Alex, he’ll do it to save him from having any more interrupted nights where Adrian’s absence disturbs his slumber.
When the late morning sun starts streaming through the window, the two of them groan in sync when it makes its way past the cloud of darkness over their eyes and Michael takes the initiative to burrow his face into Alex’s neck while, Alex himself, grabs the pillow from the other side of the bed just to plop it down over his face.
They weren’t morning people by any meaning, and Michael’s brain hasn’t woken up and started running so he is going to enjoy every extra minute he’ll be allowed to just lie in bed with Alex, and isn’t that strange to think.
He was sleeping in Alex’s bed in Santa Fe, and not in his bunk in his Airstream in Roswell.
Did he forget to mention he told no one where he was going?
The phone that starts buzzing is definitely not Alex’s so Michael knows it has to be his, but whoever is calling, can wait until he’s good and ready to get up from the cocoon that is the beautiful man under him and the comfy blanket/sheet over him.
“If it’s Adrian, he’s your son before noon” Alex mumbled from underneath the pillow.
Groaning once more, but for a different reason, Michael kisses Alex’s neck before getting out from under the covers and starts making his way to his jeans where his cellphone had been left behind.
Sniffing, Michael sees that Max is calling him making him wish his brother would’ve left him alone for a bit longer, but it’d be like asking the Gods for a miracle.
Max Evans never gives up.
As Michael walks into the living room, he finally answers the phone.
“Yo.”
“Michael, where are you? I’m at your Airstream and you’re not here.”
“You checked any of my usual haunts?” Michael asks trying to avoid telling his brother where he is for the moment.
“You’re at none of them, and you’re not down in your bunker either so where are you?”
“I’m uh, I’m in Santa Fe” Michael admits.
“What could you possibly need in Santa Fe?”
The first thing that comes to Michael’s mind is “car parts”, but Max has an unusual knack for knowing when Michael is lying; even when Michael was lying to himself, Max knew he was doing it.
“Alex, Alex is up here and I wanted to see him.”
“Michael…”
“He doesn’t know, and he might never know” Michael reassures him even though Max doesn’t have a leg to stand on since he basically outed them the first night Liz Ortecho came back into town.
“It’s not about him knowing, it’s about him moving on with his life. He has a kid, Michael.”
“Funny seeing as the only pictures he has in his apartment are mostly of him and Adrian. There’s no woman, besides the few he has of Liz and Maria, up on the walls or on the bookshelves.”
“That doesn’t mean he isn’t seeing someone.”
“Maybe, but right now I’m taking a chance that something could happen between the both of us. You’ve known for years, Max, that the only time I’ll ever be over Alex is when I’m dead, and maybe even then I won’t be.”
“You can’t just jump into his life and know he’ll accept you with open arms. People don’t work like that, Alex doesn’t work like that.”
“And what the fuck do you know about Alex? Nothing, cause you were too busy making goo-goo eyes at Liz to pay attention to him past a passing glance” Michael growled out to him knowing that with his anger came floating objects but he just couldn’t find it in himself to care at the moment.
“Come back home, Michael, there’s no reason for you to be up there.”
“Fuck off, Max.”
Michael angrly pressed the red button on his phone as his anger was getting the best of him. A few things were floating up into the air in the room around him as he stewed in what Max was trying to convince him about.
Max was saying that Alex, who Michael had just been in bed with, has moved on without him in a matter of a month. If Alex was with someone else he had seventeen years to settle down with someone else, but there is no one else. There are no pictures of people on the walls that he’s in intimate poses with, no one that looks like they are anything more than friends and coworkers; the people that you collect over years of working with them at the same place.
“Well, this makes my suspicion confirmed” came Alex’s sleep-rough voice from the opening of the hallway.
He startles Michael out of his angry stewing causing the furniture and some pictures to immediately crash back down from where they’d been floating.
“And there goes Adrian’s baby handprint” Alex says as he looks at the broken clay print that read “Adrian Charles Guerin March 12, 2009” around it or, well, it had until Michael accidentally broke it.
“Shit, Alex, I’m sorry,” Michael says as he goes over to the broken pottery trying to pick up all the pieces so he could try figuring out how to put them back together.
Alex just shrugs his shoulders and tells him, “There’s some Elmers Glue in the junk cabinet in the kitchen.”
As they both made their way over to the kitchen, Michael started mentally freaking out about what Alex had just seen him do.
“You’re panicking again, and I can hear your thoughts from here,” Alex said as he finds a bottle of Elmer's Glue in the cabinet.
“Why aren’t you freaking out?” Michael asked in a rush trying to get the topic started and finished just as quickly as he could.
“Because Adrian gave me a full two weeks to get used to his before he went off to UNM” Alex replies truthfully knowing that Michael is going to be shell shocked by what he just said, but he would give him all the time in the world to wrap his mind around it.
“What, you’re saying you got an alien pregnant?” Michael asked as he looked over to Alex who was coming towards him with the bottle of paste in his hand and a content look on his face.
“No, I’m saying it’s the other way around,” Alex says seeming to try to get Michael to understand some hidden message in his words, but Michael’s mind was racing too much to pick up on any of the hints in that sentence.
“Huh?” he asks as intelligent as a toddler.
“You got me pregnant, stupid!” Alex exclaims looking like he both wants to kiss Michael and yet, hit him upside the head.
For one blissful minute Michael was looking at Alex’s laughing face and then next the curtains had dropped and Michael was down for the count.
He’d properly blacked out.