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Alex is afraid of disappearing.
When he was a kid he’d tried to grasp onto some sense of himself with piercings and nail polish and the tangle of Michael Guerin’s curls in his fingers. And it had worked for a time, until he’d become something else, another Manes Man in uniform, a credit to the family name.
And this whole past year, in the wake of Jesse Manes’s death, Alex had vanished on all his friends, on every person in his life with whom he shared an insane, world-altering secret, and he’d gone to ground, rooting out every piece of tainted influence he could find from his father and grandfather and all the rest. He’d buried his head in the sand and he hadn’t let himself think much of what was waiting for him at the end. He’d kept going until he’d yanked out the contamination by the root.
He’d thought maybe, when he came back to Roswell, it would finally be time to emerge from hiding, to be everything he wanted to be, out in the open. He’d thought maybe with Forrest, at first, at least for a time. Forrest Long, he of the soft smiles and questionable hair dye and angsty poetry. Maybe even with Michael, eventually, if the pull in Alex’s heart isn’t leading him astray. Hell, a year’s a long time, but then again they’d been apart for a decade once, and the thing between them hadn’t vanished, had it?
(Michael hasn’t called him since he’s been back in town, and maybe Alex is being stupid, waiting for him to initiate. Maybe it doesn’t matter, given what he’s going to do next.)
Because now Alex is standing in a secret government facility staring at a piece of tech that he’s already 99% sure is alien in origin, and he can feel Alex Manes slipping into the shadows again, some version of the soldier taking over and calling the shots.
He’s afraid of Eduardo Ramos, afraid of Deep Sky, afraid of the ring on his finger and the seven-step security process he’ll need to use every day just to get into the building. He’s afraid that all the layers of lies and secrecy are going to cover him up again, and nobody will be able to find him underneath.
Forrest had been afraid of just that. Forrest had basically given him an ultimatum, albeit a very gentle one. Join Deep Sky, and become someone who can’t share himself with another person. Become someone cut off from the world. Or don’t. Keep the secrets of the universe sitting untouched on the table, walk away from them, be someone else. Be happy.
Alex isn’t going to pretend he’s not very fucking tempted.
But he can’t leave anything on the table, can he? Not when Deep Sky might have the answers Michael’s been looking for all his life. Not when Alex might be able to hand him back a piece of his past, or the key to his future.
So he’ll disappear, for a little while longer. He’ll hope Michael has it in him to keep waiting. But even if he doesn’t, that will be okay too. Alex has spent the past year fighting to keep Michael safe; he’ll spend the rest of his life doing it if that’s what it takes. Even if he loses himself in the process.
*****
Michael is afraid of being seen.
Oh, it’s all he craves, the very thing he wants most in the world, and in the minutes he got to have with his mother, she’d looked at him like she knew exactly who he was and she loved him anyway, and it was the most excruciatingly lovely thing to have ever happened to him.
And it had ended in ashes and pain, like so much of his life seems to, no matter how hard he tries to stop it.
It’s why he leans so hard into the worst of himself, taking his bad impulses and unkind thoughts and making them the definition of who he is. He’s the monster, the unwanted extra, the freak without a roof over his head, a junkyard drunk with a reputation for fucking shit up.
It’s why the people who knew him before he’d decided that’s who he was are so precious to him, and so dangerous.
Max, Isobel, Alex. He can’t pretend with them. He can scream it in their faces, I’m not worthy, and they won’t believe him because they remember someone else. They see someone else, someone good, and sometimes Michael hates it so much he wants to break things.
Knowing what he knows now, about the Dictator, he almost can’t wait to throw it in their faces. See, Max? I was never worth saving. See, Isobel? You’d be better off without me.
See, Alex? You kept me hoping for an entire year and then rolled back into town without a fucking word and you were right, because I’m not safe, I’m not what you deserve. I never have been, and I never can be. It’s baked right into my DNA, the corroded core of who I am. Stay away if you know what’s fucking good for you.
It’s all bullshit, of course. Michael’s self-loathing is real but it’s not actually all-encompassing. He doesn’t want to die, and he knows for a fact that there’s a list of people who will grieve for him if he’s gone. He knows that Max and Isobel and Alex and Maria and hell, even Kyle Valenti and Liz Ortecho, would choose to know him no matter where he came from, who his parents are. It’s all bullshit because he holds his hand to the flames and thinks of the years he’d carried in that flesh a mangled reminder of what he’s not allowed to have, and then he pulls his hand free and he’s glad it doesn’t hurt anymore.
He’s glad Max healed him, he’s glad he can play music if he wants to, he’s glad he’d had full use of both of his hands when he’d pressed affection and devotion into Maria DeLuca’s skin, for the time they had together.
He’s glad that even though it scares him, he’s let people see him. Even Alex, that asshole, wherever he’s been keeping himself hidden, whatever excuses he’s got for why he’s been away and stayed away even though Michael misses him so bad it’s like something’s crawling under his skin, eating him up from the inside. Michael has waited this long to figure out what his life is going to be, whether or not he can carve out a place to be happy. He can wait a little while longer.
He’s got time, doesn’t he?