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one.
Kyle thinks that he should get paid for being the Alex wrangler, apparently no one has seen him for days, and Liz had come back from the cabin looking worried, so Kyle had sighed and thought about it for all of thirteen seconds before he realized the only place Alex could possibly be at.
He tells Liz that he’ll take care of it, and leaves her in his office as he takes the drive to the junkyard.
Alex’s car isn’t parked at the front, but neither is Michael’s truck.
He gets out of his car and goes to the Airstream. It’s early in the morning, and there are hardly any sounds, so he can make out the low whir of the generator running as the heater keeps the inside of the Airstream warm, and since Michael’s average core temperature is somewhere above 108° there is only one other person who would be inside.
He knocks on the door, but no one answers.
He sighs, long and loud and wishes that he wasn’t the only one of his friends who seems to have become an actual adult during the last ten years.
“Alex,” he yells knocking on the door even louder, but still nothing.
“Alex!” He yells again. “Come on! I know you’re in there!”
The door opens then, almost hitting Kyle in the face, and Alex looks entirely like he’s been spending the last couple of days he’s been missing, sleeping.
His eyes are half lidded, and there are pillow marks on his cheek and his hair looks like a rat’s nest and his clothes are all rumpled and not even his, and he also smells a little like he hasn’t showered in all that time as well.
“What?” He asks, making an attempt to glare at Kyle and managing to just look really tired.
“I know you’re catching up on your beauty sleep, but your friends are getting really worried about you.”
Alex’s brow furrows, “Why?”
The confusion on his voice is clear, and Kyle really doesn’t want to be the person to tell him that no one knows where he is because no one thinks he and Michael are anything more than exes who made each other miserable.
“Because they haven’t seen you in days,” Kyle explains carefully, like he’s talking to a two year old.
Alex just rolls his eyes and rubs one of his eyes, yawning.
“At least send them a message that you’re okay.”
Alex gives him a sheepish look.
“I left my phone at the cabin.”
Kyle looks up to the sky to ask for patience and then sighs when he looks back to Alex to see him leaning back against the side of the entrance, eyes half closed.
“Fine,” he says. “I’ll let everyone know that you’re okay, please try to make it to Friday Night Dinner at Isobel’s this week so that people don’t think I’m lying.”
Alex just nods his head, and turns to go back inside.
Kyle rolls his eyes, and closes the door after him, turning around and getting into his car.
He should have at least taken a picture, but at least he tried, and that should be enough for Liz.
two.
Liz stuffs Michael’s keys into her pocket so that she doesn’t lose them and climbs up the steps to get into the Airstream, humming to herself as she does.
She looks around the small space for the desk area and stops short when she sees that she’s not alone.
Alex looks entirely too comfortable, sitting down on the small cot, back towards the far plywood headboard. His laptop is balanced on top of his lap, and there are thick headphones covering his ears, and his fingers are moving quickly across the keyboard, but he doesn’t seem like he’s working. Not with the slight smirk curling his lips, like he’s in the lead in a race that’s about to finish.
Liz is just frozen staring at him, wondering what the hell he’s doing there, when he raises his arms in the air in victory, doing a little shimmy and saying yes, before he looks up and spots Liz.
He doesn’t look like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t, just a little surprised until he recognizes her and he smiles, pulling the headphones down to hang around his neck, and she can hear whatever it is he’s listening to, which sounds like the victory music from Mortal Kombat.
“Hey,” he says, like they’re meeting in a public place by chance and not inside of Michael’s Airstream.
“Hi,” she says, feeling a little wrong footed. “What are you doing here?”
He raises an eyebrow at her like she’s the one intruding into his space, “I think the better question is what are you doing here?”
Liz gives him a defiant look, “Michael gave me his keys and asked me to pick up the rest of the serum he left in here.”
She raises an eyebrow at him expectantly.
“I have my own key and an open invitation that dates back ten years,” he says giving her a sharp smile and then setting the laptop aside to drag himself to the other side of the cot and then he’s knocking on the counter on the side and then on the top and the drawer opens up like he just did a magic trick.
“It gets stuck,” he says like that explains anything.
He reaches into the drawer and pulls the two vials of serum out and holds them out to Liz.
Liz takes them, and just watches as Alex smiles, and says. “It was nice seeing you.”
And then he’s settling himself against the wall, hair illuminated by the sun coming through the window, and he slides his headphones back over his head and puts the laptop back on his lap and promptly forgets all about Liz.
Liz can tell that she’s been dismissed so she tightens her hold on the vials and walks back out of the Airstream not bothering to lock it behind her.
three.
“Look,” Michael says a little too loudly, sounding frustrated and tired, but Isobel doesn’t really care. “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try. I’m just saying that we should wait until the next lightning storm, so that we can be at full power.”
Isobel scoffs, “If only there were some resident brainiacs around that could synthesize a serum for that, oh wait!”
Michael rolls his eyes, and opens his mouth to argue, but then the door to the Airstream, opens with a loud squeak that drags both their attention to it, and Isobel’s annoyance at the interruption turns to surprise.
Alex stands on the bottom step of the Airstream, looking like he just spent the last ten minutes tossing and turning and running his hands through his hair, trying to sleep, to no avail.
He looks like he hasn’t slept in a while, and Isobel would feel sorry, but she had no idea that Michael had company, especially when he’s still dating Maria.
She turns to him raising an eyebrow, and Michael is looking at Alex and grimacing.
“Sorry,” he says, and Isobel hears Alex make a wordless noise that Michael apparently understands because he holds his hand out with the coffee that Isobel had brought him.
“What are you doing here, so early in the morning?” Isobel asks as he grabs the coffee from Michael’s hands, voice implying the reason that she’s thinking.
Alex and Michael turn to her in unison and it makes her feel odd to see it.
“I sleep here sometimes,” Alex says.
“He sleeps here sometimes,” Michael says at the same time.
Isobel’s eyes narrow, but Alex takes a sip of the coffee and makes a face before handing it back to Michael.
Michael doesn’t look too apologetic. “There’s some from the office in the thermos on top of the counter.”
Alex makes a low noise, that Isobel would classify as a moan of pleasure before he’s moving fast, back to the Airstream.
Isobel watches Michael as he watches Alex go back inside, something fond in his gaze and she rolls her eyes so hard she sees the curvature of the Earth.
“Just think about it,” she says sighing when it takes him a while to turn back to her. “And not just about the serum.”
She raises an eyebrow pointedly, and he just gives her a confused look like he has no idea what she’s talking about.
four.
Maria exhales roughly as she kills the ignition and tries not to feel like she’s making another mistake.
Last night had been rough and long time coming, but she had also said some things that she really didn’t mean.
She broke up with Michael last night and while she doesn’t exactly regret, she does know that if Michael asks her for another chance she’ll say yes.
Their relationship had more complications than she had been expecting when she slept with him in Texas, but there were moments that made the fights and the awful feeling in the pit of her stomach, like she had done something wrong, worth it.
She gets out of her truck and walks with determination to the Airstream.
Even if they don’t get back together, at least she can let him know that she didn’t actually mean it when she told him to never come back to the bar.
She stops right at the door and takes a deep breath before she knocks on it.
There is no answer.
She exhales in a rush and looks around herself and sees that Michael’s truck is there, so unless he slept over at Isobel’s, he should be here.
She looks at her watch and sees that it’s almost noon, so Michael should be awake already, since he never sleeps in later than six on a good day.
She knocks on the door again, but once again, there is no answer.
Maria purses her mouth and then tries to open the door.
It opens easily, and she shakes her head at the amount of careless that Michael is, but she bites down on her lip.
She didn’t come here to start another fight.
She came here to fix things.
She walks into the Airstream, and looks over to the bed, and feels her heart jump into her throat.
She moves closer, almost like she’s in a trance and stops right by the edge of the bed when her foot hits something heavy.
She looks down and feels dread creeping into her, until she picks up the bottle and notices that the seal hasn’t been broken.
She looks back to the bed.
Michael and Alex are curled up like puppies on top of the bed, sheets tangled down by their feet. They’re facing each other and their legs are overlapping and their hands are curled together in the small space between their chests, and their foreheads are pressed together.
Maria feels a pang in her chest, but also an overwhelming feeling of relief that at least Michael had someone to lean on when he was upset instead of drinking and setting back his progress.
She stares at them, at how they’re still asleep even though she made enough noise walking in here, especially Alex who seems to have taken the Mad-Eye Moody’s approach to life, and is constantly on edge making sure that he’s always fully aware of everything.
She’s seen Michael sleep that deep only once and it was settled in bed with Max and Isobel.
She wonders how they could get that comfortable in that small bed to sleep that well, but there is a small part of her that she doesn’t want to acknowledge that it probably has nothing to do at all with the bed.
She tightens her fingers around the bottle and leaves, making sure to close the door behind her.
She’ll call Michael later. And hopefully he’ll actually pick up the phone now that they're not dating.
five.
Alex is lying back on the tailgate, shirtless and wearing a pair of swim shorts and bug eyed sunglasses.
One of his hands is hanging from the edge, close enough that if Michael wanted to, he could hold it, but he doesn’t.
He just lies back in the kid’s swimming pool full of icy cold water that he set in the shade of the truck, to keep himself cool when it seems like the temperature wants to kill him, and stares at it, wondering what Alex would do if Michael reached out and threaded their fingers together.
Instead of doing that, he looks up to the sky, his own pair of shades protecting him from the deadly sunlight and asks the question he’s been meaning to ask for a while.
“Why are you here?” He asks, and he can feel Alex freezing, even though he’s not watching him. “I mean, you have your own place, and probably a more comfortable bed, and even a living room, but more importantly an AC unit, but still, you’re always here.”
There is a moment of silence before Alex moves, turning on his stomach and leaning his head on his arm to look down at Michael.
“Do you mind?” He asks, and Michael has to actually look at his face because it sounds like he’s worried that Michael actually minds.
“No,” Michael says like it should be obvious, and Alex smiles at him, a soft warm thing that Michael never sees him pull on anyone else.
It always sends a mad fluttering in his stomach.
“But you do have your own place,” he repeats.
“Yeah,” Alex says, wrinkling his nose. “But it doesn’t feel like home."
"And you feel at home here?” Michael asks, incredulous, but his heart starts racing as he waits for Alex to reply to the question.
Alex purses his mouth, and looks like he doesn’t actually want to answer, but he sighs and lets his hand drop, to hang off the tailgate, fingers barely touching the water right by Michael’s leg.
“It’s more like,” he says in a low voice, almost like he doesn’t want Michael to hear. “I feel at home wherever you are.”
Michael feels his stomach clench and his heart race, and he wants to drag Alex down from the tailgate and settle him on his lap and kiss him until they forget that they’re not together, but instead he reaches out and takes Alex’s hand.
He feels the way that Alex freezes, and holds his breath for a second.
Alex slowly exhales, and he slowly threads their fingers together.
Michael feels a warmth in the pit of his stomach, and he smiles before he looks back to Alex who Michael can tell is staring at their hands even though he can’t see his eyes.
“You feel like home to me, too,” he says in an equally low and secret tone.
Alex smiles and squeezes his fingers.