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The town drunk doesn’t get to know about the government’s nastiest secrets.
It’s not fair that he’s become this, but it’s not like he had anyone to take care of him once Nora got taken and then Louise left. Walt didn’t have the kind of help he needed after he’d run away (again), so he’d learned how to tend to a field and he’d figured out how to repair a car.
The years passed and Sanders also learned that a beer helps with loneliness. He learns that whiskey can make time slide on by. He finds out that tequila can turn your mood and your frown upside down. Soon enough, he’s not just working for cash to save up and buy something, but because he needs to keep his habit in check.
He never steals. He never hurts anyone for it. Nora and Louise taught him better than that, and Walt wouldn’t ever want to disappoint them.
Still, a one-eyed mechanic in his twenties with a drinking problem isn’t something that garners a helluva lot of respect, even if he’s been taking enough jobs and saving money the right kind of way that lets him pick up parcels of land here and there, along with bunch of scraps from the junkyard.
That’s where he sets up shop.
Twenty-six years old, Walt Sanders returns to Roswell and starts the Sanders’ Auto Junkyard.
That same year, he decides he needs to find the pods from the map he’s been left with. He might not have the town’s respect, but he’s got money and they’ll respect that, even if they won’t look him in the eye to do it.
Funny, though, how the government denies and denies and denies.
Every Manes military asshole he tries talking to insists they don’t know a goddamn thing (liars) and every Valenti is no better (cowards). Sanders knows better than to talk to the Longs or the Evans’. They’re so deeply in the dark that you could rob them blind and they wouldn’t even know they’d been had.
He knows better than to wave around his map, he just thought maybe the government would fess up to knowing
Still, is he surprised? Really and truly?
He’ll find those pods and he’ll do right by Nora and Louise. It doesn’t matter if he’s become a shell of the man they thought he’d be. They’re not around to see him, are they? They lost their right to judge him when he got left behind. They took away his eye, they took away his family, and they took away his hope.
He’s left with a map and the drink and only one of those two things is getting him through the day.
One day, he’ll follow that map and see what it is Nora’s left him – apart from grief and the absence of her presence in his life.
Until then, the town drunk will repair the town’s cars and bear their disrespect.
He can deal with it. The tequila does a hell of a lot to help, after all.
The town drunk isn’t allowed to adopt the child the truckers found out on the freeway.
Sanders takes great pains to check on the pods after he’d tracked them down, but he never manages to figure out how to wake them up. He turns thirty, then forty, and then fifty. Still, the children in the pods don’t wake up.
Then, one day, the pods are empty. The next week, there’s a story in the local newspaper about a bunch of kids that got found on the side of the road. Three of them, and not a single one of them know how to speak. It’s a strange story, but that’s not what gets Sanders’ attention.
It’s the look of the curly-haired one in the newspaper.
He’s got Nora’s eyes. Suddenly, Walt feels like he’s eight-years-old again.
The next week, he shakily does up his tie as best as he can. He’d foregone liquor for two days, but he’s got an awful case of the shakes as a result and the goddamn knot of the tie is something he’s never had to do. Now he’s trying to do it one-eyed and with an unsteady hand. He puts on a mothball-ridden tweed suit jacket and his best polite smile so when he visits, he can apply to bring Nora’s boy home.
“Mr. Sanders,” the woman at the office says. “You know we can’t let you do that.”
Her eyes slide to his shaky hands and within seconds, it’s not the detox that’s making him shake, but the rage.
He can see the boy playing in the other room. He’s so goddamn small. He looks like he’s about Walt’s age, when he’d first met Nora, and suddenly he feels a vicious sympathy for her. This is who she’d been waiting to dance with, and Walt had to be the best replacement he could be.
What good is he, if he can’t even give the boy a home?
“Please,” he begs, roughly. “I’m not asking for you to send him home with me right now. I’ll clean myself up. I’ll fix it. That boy deserves a home.”
“And he’ll get one,” the woman promises, reaching out to take Walt’s shaky hand between her own. “He’ll get a good home, a proper one, with two parents who can support him and don’t have their own … problems.”
They send him off without a second thought. He’s not good enough. He’s not even worth consideration for a kid who needs a home and who’s sitting in there day after day without a parent to take care of him.
He wants to believe he’ll do better, but the thing is, he’s been like this for so long now that he doesn’t know how. He tells himself that he’ll stop drinking. He’ll become responsible. He’ll show them.
The longest he makes it is four days before he falls back to old vices. He’s back at the liquor store to cope with the nightmares of fire and guns and screaming. He’s there to try and deaden the guilt of letting everything happen the way it did.
It doesn’t take long for town gossip to get around, which means the people at the children’s office hear about him.
The next time he goes to visit Michael (because that’s what they named him, Michael, and he wonders what his real name is, wishes that Nora had told him), they’re even less pleased to see him.
“Mr. Sanders,” the woman at the front desk says. “You have to understand, we require a certain type of person and you’re…”
The town drunk doesn’t get to take care of Nora’s son.
“Would you just make sure he gets taken care of?”
“That’s what we do here,” she says. Sanders doesn’t know that they’re full of shit, not yet, but what’s the alternative? He’s ruined his reputation and there’s no way they’re going to send Michael home with him.
He’s left with empty promises and empty bottles clinking around his truck.
God damn, but he’s glad Nora and Louise can’t see him now.
The town drunk isn’t supposed to give up his couch and dog for the night when the weather starts taking a turn for the worse.
Roswell’s weather isn’t usually this nasty, but the dust storm moving in is fixing to ruin anything that’s left out in the open. Turns out, tonight, that includes curly-haired troublemakers lurking around Foster’s Ranch.
“Hey!” Sanders snaps, slamming the truck door. “Guerin! I see you, kid.”
The idiot kid tries to duck and roll into the fields, but Sanders has longer legs and within a few long strides, he’s got a hand on the back of Guerin’s collar, preventing him from sprinting off into the storm.
“Quit it,” he snaps, wriggling and glaring at Sanders.
This is probably a very bad idea. He knows what aliens can do. If Guerin got a mind to do it, he could whip Sanders a mile away with nothing more than a blink. Then, he’d run right into the dust storm and mess up his eyes.
“I heard the police scanner talking about an idiot kid out here, so I figured I’d come find him before he lost an eye too,” Sanders complains, hauling him towards the truck, despite Guerin’s struggle otherwise. “Would you stop it already? Damn it, Guerin.”
Every time he uses that name, he hates it a little more, because he knows it’s not really his name. Nora never did say what her son was called and Sanders regrets more than anything else that he never did ask. He can’t give Guerin a stable house. He can’t give him the kind of love and support he needs. He couldn’t even make sure the office kept their word when they’d told him they’d find him a good home.
It just would’ve been nice to have been able to give him a name.
“I’m not going with you,” Guerin says through gritted teeth.
“No? You’re gonna just walk into a dust storm?” Sanders releases him, a few feet away from the rusted old Chevy. “Cuz I made way too many scrambled eggs and I got a comfortable couch and a blanket with your name on it.”
The offer is instantly met with suspicion.
“What do I have to give you?”
“You got small hands,” Sanders says, having figured that Guerin wouldn’t accept the help for free. “I got a few engines that need looking at. You get to stay the night, play with the dog, eat my food, and in the morning when things clear up, I’ll teach you a thing or two and you can help me fix shit.”
Guerin still looks wary, but the storm’s swirling in even harder than before.
“I’m driving away,” he warns, climbing back into the driver’s seat.
He slams the door shut and a few seconds later, Guerin clambers into the passenger side, hugging his backpack tight to his chest. The silence in the truck feels like it could swallow him whole and Sanders wants a drink more than anything, but he’s got to be responsible.
The town won’t recognize that he can be and he’ll be damned if he gives them the satisfaction.
“Good. Didn’t want to have to call the cops to get your corpse off my property,” he grunts, keeping his eyes on the road.
“Whatever,” Guerin grunts.
That’s the trick, he figures. Guerin doesn’t want help, so he has to act like this is a damn inconvenience to get him to accept it. Seeing as he doesn’t end up tucking and rolling out of the truck and lets Sanders escort him into his place before the storm blows in, he’ll take it, even if it eats him alive treating Nora’s boy like this.
Still – better at arm’s reach and safe than coddled and dead.
The town drunk isn’t supposed to hire fourteen-year-old kids who keep avoiding home.
“You’re a quick study,” he tells Guerin, when he drops by for his first shift to pay him back for some of the food he’d eaten during Sanders’ last rescue. “Don’t fuck anything up too badly and I’ll pay you fairly.”
Guerin mutters something under his breath that’s insulting as hell, but that’s teenagers for you. They give you no goddamn respect.
They also don’t leave.
When Sanders drops by to close up for the night, Guerin’s still there working on more cars. The sun’s dipping down into the horizon and it’ll get cold soon enough. Still, Guerin doesn’t look like he’s planning to leave.
“I’m not paying you overtime.”
“Don’t care,” Guerin says. “I like it.”
It sounds like there’s a hint of truth in that, but it’s not the whole story. “You've been living with those nuns these days, haven’t you?”
Guerin buries himself a little further into the engine, headful of curls disappearing. He thinks he’s so goddamn clever, making it so he can’t answer Sanders. Fine, then. Two can play at that game.
“I don’t want to get into shit with a bunch of religious nutjobs,” he scoffs. “I’ll take you back in the morning.”
The curls reappear. “It’s a school day tomorrow? It’s Monday,” he scoffs.
Sanders blinks, shaking his head like the epiphany just occurred to him. “Huh. It is, isn’t it? Think maybe I’m going senile or something,” he says. “Well, I guess if you’re going to school during the day, your shifts are gonna have to be some other time. Once you’re out of school, you’ll come work here. Then, no point in you traipsing back to the nuns at midnight, so if you ever work late, guess you can just crash on my couch.”
Guerin’s eyeing him suspiciously, looking for the catch. “Really?”
“I’m not pulling a kid out of school. The principal would come after me,” he says. “I’m also not giving up my best employee,” he adds, because in a single shift, Guerin’s proven to be better than most of the temporary help he’s brought around. “Now, come on. You can break in the couch tonight, but fair warning, it’s a piece of shit.”
He knows it’s probably better than whatever Guerin’s sleeping on lately.
Guerin probably knows it too.
Neither of them is going to say a single word about it.
The town drunk isn’t supposed to wake up weeping one night when he dreams of Nora screaming and her pain radiating throughout the cosmos.
Whatever’s going on, Sanders gets the feeling he’s not the only one in emotional turmoil. Guerin had been doing better, but all of a sudden, he’s going down a familiar path that Sanders knows all too well. Sometimes, Sanders hates feeling like he’s accidentally been a bad role model for Guerin without realizing it.
His own problems with alcohol aren’t supposed to infect Guerin. Nora would be so goddamn disappointed in him.
When he bumps into Guerin at the liquor store, he’s not sure what he’s supposed to say. It’s not like he’s got the authority to talk about putting your life back together. Hell, he picked a place to live that was close to this very store just so he could get access to it.
Still, he’s got to try.
“Noticed you’re not parking on my land anymore. That mean I have to stop charging you rent?”
“I was paying you rent?”
“In labor,” Sanders replies, even though he’s never kept track (just like he’s never really taken a moment to notice how many pieces of copper wire had gone missing from right under his nose). “Where you been, kid?”
“Me and DeLuca are trying something, so I’ve been parking at the Pony.”
Sanders isn’t sure what to feel about that. Sure, the companionship is good and helps from letting him spiral even further, but he’s got an ear to the ground (hasn’t lost one of those) and knows Maria doesn’t know about the alien thing, plus that easy access to alcohol isn’t a good thing.
He ought to know.
Still, who the hell is he to talk? Look where he is right now.
“Kid, you know you can talk to me about anything. Right?”
Guerin’s grip on the whiskey only tightens as he sniffs sharply. “Talking’s the last thing I want to do right now.” Now, looking a little closer, Sanders notices the bandanna around Guerin’s hand that hadn’t been there before.
What the hell’s been going on? First, that dream, then Max Evans bolts out of town at the same time as Noah Bracken, and now this?
“Then drink with me,” he says sharply, as caustic as ever. “Like I give a damn what you do.”
It’s a lie, but unfortunately, he’s a good liar, because Guerin can’t tell the difference.
“Busy,” Guerin bites out, brushing past Sanders with a bump against his shoulder. It’s posturing, and he’s damn good at it, because it makes Sanders bristle just enough that his anger rises and he wants to drink even more.
The kid’ll come around, eventually.
That, or maybe it’s about time for more drastic measures – like the truth.
The town drunk isn’t supposed to grow prize-winning flowers every year, but damn if Michael doesn’t have a green thumb to make his mother jealous.
It’s been a long time since he had to use reverse-psychology and pretend that Michael was a damn nuisance, but it’s still nice to have him show up every year with seedlings, fertilizer, and a pair of gardening gloves.
“We still doing this? How many prizes do we need?”
“Until we’re drowning in ‘em,” Michael replies.
He’s been lighter these days. It’s good to see, and of course it means Sanders has got to meddle.
“So, I noticed that you’ve been packing up your Airstream,” Sanders comments in between planting rows of sunflowers. “Is my one eye deceiving me, or are you shacking up with that pretty friend of yours.”
Is he ever going to let Michael live that one down?
Nope. Never.
Plus, it’s damn amusing watching him blush the way he does, like he’s still that idiot teenager who keeps rambling about his music classes while he makes box macaroni and cheese for Sanders and his dog, as if Sanders hadn’t clocked right then and there that his obsession with that class went beyond guitars.
It’s about damn time he’s owning up to that.
“Alex and I are moving in together,” Michael says out loud, and it almost seems like it takes him aback, given the way he stops working. “I haven’t even told the others yet, I’m kind of freaking out,” he admits. “My whole life is a junker Airstream, a trunk that runs on a lot of luck, and a garbage bag of stuff.”
Once again, like it always does, a phantom rusty knife stabs into Sanders’ side – an old reminder that he hadn’t been able to rescue Michael from that nomad life.
“I don’t know how to live with someone else. I’ll probably fuck it up.”
“Yeah. Probably.”
Michael shoots him an annoyed look from where he’s planting the next few saplings. “Wow,” he scoffs, heavy on the sarcasm. “Aren’t you supposed to be giving me a pep talk?”
Sanders gestures to himself, tossing some of the fertilizer stakes he’d prepared at Michael so the flowers don’t wither and die. “Who the hell do I look like, your sympathetic and prettier friends? You’re gonna fuck up. We all do. It just matters what you do after it. Apologize, talk to him, sort it out. Expecting someone to be perfect is a hell of a burden. You think Alex wants you to be perfect?”
Michael shrugs, digging his holes a little deeper.
Sanders wanders over with the watering can, shoving it into the dirt beside Michael. “I might not know the boy the same as you, but I get the feeling he just wants you to be you.”
“...maybe.”
“What was that?”
“Fine!” Michael grunts. “I won’t sabotage this one before I even get in!”
“There it is,” Sanders says with approval, nudging Michael with a trowel. “Fix that one on the right, that’s horseshit that won’t work for a grocery store arrangement, never mind a blue ribbon.”
“Where are you gonna put this year’s ribbon? You gotta be swimming in them, by now.”
He is, but that’s fine by him. They’ve got a home, and if Michael ever drops by, he’ll see them on the wall with a few dried flowers, an old map, a few old pieces of alien junk, and the most treasured objects he owns – a couple of newspaper clippings and the random photos he’s managed to get with him and Michael over the years.
It’s a wall of prized possessions, after all.
The town drunk doesn’t own a suit because who the hell would ever invite him to a wedding.
That, and he doesn’t understand why the fire’s burning under their asses to get married so soon. Unless Nora and Louise neglected to tell him something, he’s pretty sure that there’s no pregnancy scare that made this happen so fast.
Then again, Sanders has watched Michael act like an idiot over this boy for decades.
Maybe the question is why the hell they’ve been so damn slow?
Louise’s daughter grabs him at some point when he’s milling around the group, trying to awkwardly avoid conversation with all the young idiots while fussing with his tie, bringing him in to be something old for Michael’s sake or give him something old that belonged to his mother.
Either way, there’s a whole lotta years between him and Nora’s item.
That bone-crushing hug he gets is worth it, though, just as much as seeing the look on Michael’s face when he says ‘I do’. This day’s been a long-time coming, and even the one-eyed drunk could’ve seen that.
Later, at the reception, he’s indulging in the extreme generosity of the open bar and he gets a much calmer version of the groom (which, honestly, is a damn good thing because he’s too old to go chasing after a goddamn runaway).
“How long did you know about me taking the copper wire?” Michael asks, after he’s finally relented his watchful eye on Alex.
Sanders gives Michael a sympathetic look. “I may be half-blind, but I’m still perceptive as hell. I’ve always known,” he says quietly. “I also knew that I couldn’t be the home you needed when you were young and I couldn’t be the good influence you needed in your teen years. I got enough goddamn money and land, and you didn’t. I figured if you were taking it, you needed the cash.”
“Sorry I took advantage of you like that,” Michael mutters, picking the label off his beer.
“Kid, I learned a long time ago that I couldn’t give you anything. You had to feel like you were taking it to do it at all. If I tried to give it to you, that damn stubbornness of yours would’ve had you refusing.”
Sanders knows, because he’d done the same, and sometimes looking at Michael is like looking in a mirror.
“I was happy to let you take everything you needed,” Sanders promises, clapping him on the shoulder. “You never took advantage of me. Everything was freely given.”
“Not everyone would’ve done it for an idiot like me.”
“You’re not an idiot, kid. You were just surrounded by people who couldn’t see the amazing kid right in front of them. Your Mom would be proud of you,” Sanders says quietly, refusing to let go of Michael just yet. He cups his neck, gripping him in tight as he pulls him into a hug. “I know that, because she never loved anyone half as much as she loved you. I knew that, even without seeing the two of you together.”
Michael sniffs sharply and when he eases back, his eyes are shiny with tears.
“Dunno,” he says, wiping at his nose with his sleeve and ruining the damn suit. “I picked up from a few places that there was this runaway kid that she was pretty fond of.” He lets out a shaky exhalation, which is good because it masks the way Sanders inhales sharply. “Fuck. Imagine if she had managed to get me out? The two of us, running around Roswell together? Being grumpy old men?”
Sanders shoves at Michael, glad the kid’s wearing that insufferable smirk again.
“Hey, I bet you were even hot as a kid,” Michael teases. “Maybe you and I…”
“I think it’s time for you to get your husband to stuff some cake in your mouth before you say something we’re both gonna regret.”
Alex is signalling to Michael, which is a good thing, because Sanders is going to need a hell of a lot more tequila if they keep going down this road.
“She’d be proud of you too, you know,” Michael says, easing away. “I know I am, and like you said, I got a lot of my Mom in me.”
He’s back by Alex’s side within seconds, which is good. That way, he doesn’t have to see the way he’d managed to get Sanders all choked up.
He’s got a reputation to maintain, damn it. The town drunk’s supposed to not give a shit about anything at all.
Where the hell did he go wrong, huh?
Walt Sanders isn’t supposed to have any of this.
Lucky for him, he took in one hell of a stubborn bastard of a kid all those years ago, even when the town wouldn’t let him and people kept looking down on him for trying to help.
“He’s gonna cry,” Sanders warns. “My hands are shaking like the devil these days and I know you’re keen on letting that friend of yours try all her fancy new treatments on me to reverse my ageing cells, but giving a baby to me is…”
“Would you shut up and hold my kid?” Michael interrupts him, settling in beside him to support Sanders’ shaking hands, looking at him in that damn nervous way he’s always had since he was a boy.
It’s the look that says he’s so desperate for approval, he’d do just about anything to get it. When the hell is he gonna learn that Sanders has always loved him, from the moment he first saw him, because he knew he was Nora’s boy.
“I still think you’re both idiots,” Sanders mutters, even as the sleeping baby settles into his hands, supported on his lap.
Nearby, Alex glances over at them from where he’s making tea, raising a brow warily. “Thanks?”
“There’s a thousand other names out there,” Sanders mutters. “You had to saddle the poor kid with mine?”
That seems to amuse Alex somehow, smiling that damn pretty smile he gets when there’s some joke he’s got in the back of his mind. Michael looks terrified and in disbelief and suddenly Sanders wants to take it all back.
“Michael,” Sanders says, leaning forward to get a good lock on his eye. “Hey. Kid, look at me,” he insists and waits until Michael does for him to go on. “I’m honored, okay? It’s the best thing that’s ever happened, I just never expected it. You’ve got all kinds of people in your life, you naming your second-born after an old man came out of left field.”
“He’s named after the one person who had faith in me before everyone else did,” Michael says roughly, his voice halfway stuck between sandpaper and a sob. “The one person who loved me, because my Mom loved him when he was little. We’re family, aren’t we? You get to name your kid after your family.”
That’s what he is, is it? Family?
Well, god damn it. Now he’s thinking he might cry.
The town drunk isn’t supposed to end up all misty-eyed and choked up because of an alien boy who grew up to be a good husband and a great father, but he’s just so damn proud of him and it means the world to him that Michael loves him right back.
“You’re a good kid, you know that?”
“I’m my mother’s son,” Michael says fondly, grabbing at Sanders to haul him in for a hug, draped over his shoulder so he can lean in and look at his baby in Sanders’ lap. “She had a great instinct when it came to keeping the right people near. Gotta live up to her example, you know? From what I hear, she took a real shining to some local kid. I can see why, too,” he says, suddenly looking like the mature father he is.
Sanders exhales shakily, wishing that he could’ve been better.
Maybe if he’d drank less, maybe if he’d found Michael and the others sooner, maybe if he’d made a stronger case, maybe, maybe, maybe…
“You’re bleeding out with those thoughts,” Michael warns with a pointed look.
“Stop being a psychic, then.”
Alex returns with a warmed bottle, giving them both an amused look. “Telling Michael what to do, that always works well. Right?” He shares a conspiratorial look with Sanders, who could write goddamn novels about the stubbornness of Michael Guerin.
Right now, though, that’s the last thing on his mind.
“Hey, Walt,” Sanders greets the child that’s going to grow up with a piece of him, even if in name alone. “Your parents saddled you with one hell of a name, but I already know arguing with both of them is like fighting your way out of quicksand.” He shares a quick smirk with Michael. “Impossible,” he accuses.
“Takes one to know one,” Michael replies smugly.
Well, now, Sanders can’t argue that.
This isn’t the life the town drunk was ever supposed to get, but he’s been surrounded by the impossible from his earliest memories. Seeing Michael smile at him, having Alex press a drink into his hand, watching baby Walt stare at him until he’s lulled to sleep – these are all things he never could have predicted and never could have imagined he deserved.
He gets them anyway.
The town drunk found himself abducted by some very stubborn aliens and there isn’t a day with them that Sanders would ever take back.