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Ivy League: A Not!Fic
Liz has all but broken with Roswell completely after Rosa’s death/graduation/starting college. She talks to her father, of course, and Maria sometimes, but that’s it. She would maybe talk to Alex but Alex has joined the Air Force and isn’t very talkative. Max? Whenever she thinks about calling Max, she just… doesn’t.
She never wants to go back.
Life is good. Life is horrible because her sister isn’t anywhere anymore to share it, but life as a college student? It’s good. Liz feels challenged in ways she never was in her high school science class unless spiraled into a debate with a certain rival… It’s good, and she can drown every thought about home and family that she doesn’t want to have in discovery of new things.
It’s all good until it isn’t. It’s all good until she has an idea that, no matter how hard she tries, she cannot communicate to her peers or her professors. It’s groundbreaking stuff, she knows it, it will take her field somewhere, but nobody whom she has pitched it to can see what she means. One would think the data samples would do the talking for her but no. Nobody sees what Liz does. It’s very demoralizing.
So it’s in a fit of despair and perhaps one too many beers that she looks up a years-old email address and sends everything off to Michael Guerin. Her data set, her paper that is too brilliant for anyone at her current elite school, her notes that have driven her supervisor to shake her head. It’s a cry for help. Tell me what you think?
-
Michael has not thought of Liz Ortecho aside from the guilt related to Rosa’s murder and Max’s missed opportunity since graduation. His life has not gone the way he wanted it to as a homeless but hopeful high school student. He is not anywhere near even a community college despite the full ride he’d once had in hand. What research he does is done privately and only in the vague hope of being able to go to space one day. He’s doing okay working at the Ranch and at the scrapyard but there is no denying that while he would do it all again for Isobel, it is a disappointment. (That’s not even going into the mess that is his left hand and his lost… everything with Alex.)
So when Liz’s email pops up it’s a near thing that he doesn’t delete it on sight. When he first opens it Michael tells himself it’s to check that Isobel’s nudge to keep Rosa’s sister away from Roswell still holds. It seems to. That’s all Michael really needed to know and he probably should have deleted the email then. Instead he finds himself reading. And reading. And reading.
Soon enough he is at the library with everything printed out and adding commentary. It’s the first time in forever that the outside world has stimulated him intellectually. When the library closes he takes everything to the Pony where he munches on a handful of peanuts and writes another two pages of what by then has become an essay.
Maria, to say it mildly, is bewildered by the goings-on. But anything that has Guerin sitting in her bar quietly instead of causing trouble is a good thing in her mind. And when he tells her, distractedly, “It’s for Liz”? Well, then she just has to keep the less alcoholic drinks flowing, doesn’t she?
It’s closing time when Michael finishes up and comes up to the empty bar, sheepish. “Hey, can I use your scanner?” he asks, and Maria allows him into her office where he meticulously scans all the pages he has just written and then logs into his email account and sends it on. Done.
He tries not to think about it any more but that night he sleeps better than he has since the night everything went wrong.
-
Part of Liz didn’t really think anything would come of it. She and Michael used to like debating each other – at least she knows she did and she thinks he did as well – but that was years ago when they were still in high school and Michael must have a whole life going on. Yes, she heard from Papi that he’s apparently not gone to Albuquerque after all for some unfathomable reason, but he is an adult making his own living that still has nothing at all to do with Liz Ortecho’s needs as a budding scientist.
Yet hardly a day passes after her fit of desperation and then there it is. An email, from Michael, containing hardly any greeting at all but a pdf attachment that starts with “So I think you mean…” and then goes on. And on. And on.
It’s everything she needs. The hurdle she had between where her professor sits and where Liz wants to go – it’s right here. Right here in the scan of Michael Guerin’s hand-written notes.
A way to explain the leap she made. The missing steps.
She almost cries. She sheds a few tears. Then she sits down and revises her paper until dawn.
She hits a barrier at the end. It’s her idea – her leap, her brainwave, the light bulb that will make her career. But even if her inner scientist didn’t balk at claiming Michael’s bridging work as her own, her supervisor knows Liz’s own work enough that she would question it.
Thanks so much for your help. Mind if I post your review on our science board? She texts a number as ancient as the email. From somewhere in Roswell, Michael sends a shrug emoji and a thumb’s up as a reply.
Liz duly uploads her not-so-incomprehensible-after-all draft paper onto the board and Michael’s reply as well. Now anyone who looks can find it and she can give it a place in her reference section. A Review by M. Guerin.
What follows is a whirlwind. Her professor finally gets on board with her plans. The excitement Liz expected months ago when she first came up with the concept erupts. It’s gratifying. It’s rewarding. It’s… infuriating, is what it is.
I didn’t believe I was the only one in the whole world who could have come up with the idea, she will say years later. I’m not so arrogant, or at least, most of me isn’t. I think we all daydream about being the most brilliant mind on the planet sometimes.
I knew there must be other people in the world to whom I could have shown my idea and they would just get it. I have met some of those people since, but I didn’t know them then. The people I talked to, the people I had access to, they didn’t understand. Not because they weren’t sufficiently intelligent, I want to emphasize that. Part of it was my own fault, my inability to communicate. Not that I had truly been taught how… Anyway. I knew I was right, it was just becoming clear that I didn’t have the language. No one around me who could just look at my work and intuit my intent.
So I… I was a little drunk, and a little desperate, and I contacted the one person I was sure would understand because he knows how I think. The one person who had followed my leaps of thought in science class ever since we were little kids.
Liz’s workload explodes. Class work, lab work, work for her professor, her own experiments.
She doesn’t really think about it the first time she sends another email to Michael. A review of something one of her peers is working on, and several other papers from well-established folk for context.
Michael replies to that, too. And the next one. And the next one.
If Roswell as a whole was paying any kind of attention to Michael Guerin then all of Roswell would be in awe. Instead it’s just Maria, who watches one of the most volatile wild cards in her bar find something new to hold on to and calm down.
It’s not quite a miracle drug but it’s close. The first time one of Maria’s more racist patrons starts to truly rile Michael up Maria texts Liz: Send Michael some science puzzle right now!!! And what do you know, just as Michael is about to step out and let his fists talk his phone chimes with Liz’s ringtone and he looks at it, Liz more important than some redneck asshat, and wonder of wonders, whatever Liz wrote has him sufficiently distracted. No bar fight tonight that has Michael’s name on it. Maria half can’t believe that it worked.
Max is just glad Michael doesn’t get himself arrested every other night anymore. He would be glad for all the other reasons as well, except Michael keeps him far away from all things research because there is no way he is telling his brother that Liz is writing to Michael and not him.
Isobel is also glad that Michael has found something. It lessens the chance of him losing control and committing another involuntary murder, or so she thinks. She also wants her brother happy beyond that. She was never the scholarly type and is happy to leave well enough alone as long as she can be certain he is staying. She doesn’t know what she would do if Michael decided to leave Roswell after all.
Michael doesn’t truly notice how much better his life has become. He still goes to work, still takes on random repair jobs, still spends more evenings than not in Maria’s bar. But his mind, always spinning, always hopping around, is still not quiet, but quieter. He sleeps though the night more often than he doesn’t, now. There are fewer nightmares. And some of it is that he is using his brain more, but part of it is also that he is doing something for Liz and while she doesn’t know it, will never know it, it counts as atonement. Even if all the science in the world cannot give Liz Ortecho back her sister. Or publically exonerate Rosa.
He'd have thought that after he apparently helped her over that first big hurdle that helped her explain her unified theory of genetics to her professor, Liz wouldn’t need him anymore. But some dam seems to have broken and by now she loops him in on everything she is doing. Always with scans of papers, articles and even books he needs to understand what he might not already know.
After a few months, she sends him her access codes to the uni’s online library. I’m so sorry, I should have thought of this weeks ago.
A whole new world opens. Yes, there is a lot Michael could already find on the internet with the right search parameters. Yes, the public library in Roswell also can – at snail’s pace – get him things from around the world. But this? An elite university’s library network? It’s a world of difference.
Making progress on his theoretical space ship has never been so easy.
Liz, meanwhile, is having a time of it carefully separating her own work from Michael’s so that nobody will be able to call fraud at some later time. Part of her chafes because this cannot really count as making her own way as a woman in science. Yet does it matter? Even if several of the papers she publishes rightfully say E. Ortecho & M. Guerin, her ground breaking ideas are still her own.
Who the hell is Michael Guerin? is asked a lot. Nobody can find him except on online resources uploaded by Liz. Well, also uploaded by the man himself, now. The outcries are loud whenever she claims he is a friend from high school who is self-taught.
Geniuses who do not do well after school are a known phenomenon. Liz feels a bit bad about painting this particular picture of Michael, but is she wrong? She doesn’t know why he decided not to go to Albuquerque, after all. Why he never tried to get the degree they talked about years ago some other way. All she has is that she went to damn near every relevant school in the country while he stayed in Roswell.
The thing is, she laments to her supervisor, he isn’t even all that interested in molecular biology! He should be an agricultural engineer! Or, or an astrophysicists, the last papers he’s read that’s not something from my field is all stuff from NASA!
Truly, life is unfair.
What isn’t unfair, though perhaps underhanded, is that Liz’s supervisor, having cottoned on to the veritable genius Liz has on hand, thinks to have her star student send her friend all of their program’s required assignments. It’s a lot of extra work for herself but it will be worth the Nobel Prize in the end. Which is how Michael inadvertently hands in ‘just some stuff’ that he is graded in and is listed as having earned a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree in short order.
For a doctorate he will have to show up in person.
-
Despite diligently giving Michael due credit and knowing about the clandestine title her supervisor is building towards Liz feels for the longest time that she is taking advantage. Especially once she fully realizes that Michael’s true interests lie elsewhere and he is putting in all this work for her sake. She can never repay him for all he has done, much less pay him now. With what money?
Unknowing about the Rosa factor that motivated Michael at least in the beginning, Liz appeals to her father to feed her distant friend who is doing her so many favors. And Michael has his pride, which means he insists on fixing anything Arturo needs fixed at the Crashdown, but he agrees that Arturo can feed him one meal a day. Good thing the Crashdown’s menu is well varied.
Over time this makes a huge difference in Michael’s finances. Arturo has enough bulk acquisitions that feeding one customer for free once a day doesn’t really make a dent in his books, which is exactly why Liz could make the request of her father without feeling the slightest bit guilty. For Michael, however, Michael who has known hunger more times than he should have, knowing that he has one meal a day guaranteed mitigates a lot of unacknowledged anxiety.
No, Isobel who has married her rich lawyer boyfriend would never let him starve, but that would entail telling Isobel when times turn rough, wouldn’t it?
Not having to pay for one meal a day makes it easier to pay for the outstanding two meals a day, leaving aside those days of ranch work where the work includes being fed. Less penny pinching for decent food means more resources to buy parts of the crashed space ship at auctions. It means less need to resort to semi-criminal activities. Not to mention that all the sciencing around takes up so much free time that there is little time left for said semi-criminal activities in the first place.
Being a published scientist doesn’t come with a lot of money in and of itself. However, eventually, Liz does publish some works that come with monetary compensation. Some of them are solely her own work so she gets to keep the rewards all to herself. She does need them. But some of them are E. Ortecho & M. Guerin, and so a stunned Michael’s bank account receives his rightful cut of everything.
Even less need to employ criminal energy, then.
Michael dreads the day he will have to come clean to Max about his and Liz’s collaborations. He is also looking forward to being able to go See, look, my life wasn’t ruined completely.
The first time Liz strong-arms him to come to a conference the resistance is strong. Over time, though, he and Max and Isobel become less paranoid about one of them leaving Roswell for a short time. Thus Michael turns up on a far-away campus and gets to speak in person with upcoming scientists who aren’t Liz and with scientists who are Liz’s elders. It’s still not in his preferred field but it’s still awesome.
If Liz’s supervisor takes the opportunity to quiz her protege’s wonderboy and to check even more check-marks towards Guerin’s eventual doctorate, hush, you didn’t hear her.
-
All of this does via roundabout channels eventually get back to Alex. Airman Manes knows during the first few years that Michael hasn’t yet left Roswell but still hopes, still expects, that he will. Liz doesn’t know Michael is Alex’s ‘Museum Guy’ just as she doesn’t know Michael is the one who put Rosa’s body in the driver’s seat of the burning car. But has just published her first paper in a major scientific journal and she wants her childhood friend to know it. He, too, takes care to tell her every time he gets a new qualification or is promoted.
So there’s Alex on an Air Force base who-knows-where reading through Liz’s paper and stumbling across a reference that reads M. Guerin, 2014a. And that’s not only a huge shock to his system but also too unlikely to be a coincidence?!
One research spree later he has discovered that Michael and Liz have collaborated many times by now and that Michael Guerin denies being Elizabeth Ortecho’s high school rival. He works as a mechanic and a ranch hand out of Roswell, New Mexico. To [our uni’s] eternal frustration he is entirely self-taught.
This discovery irrevocably changes Alex’s perception. Is he devastated that Guerin apparently didn’t get out of Roswell the way he so very clearly wanted? Of course. At the same time, however, Alex knows full well that sometimes plans change. And this treasure trove Liz has unknowingly handed him shows that while he still lives in the town Alex abhors more than any war zone most days, it would be wrong to claim that Guerin is wasting his life. Whether the change of plans was initially Jesse Manes’ and thus Alex’s fault as Alex fears or not, Alex has now seen proof that Michael is still making progress.
(Even if Jesse Manes at some point in the future claims that Michael is a layabout and a drunk and half a criminal: One, there are far fewer encounters with the Sheriff’s department to make any of this credible; two, Michael is not selling pilfered copper wire minutes after Jesse has made this accusation; and three, ten years after they all graduated high school Alex has spent years’ worth of enough down time stalking M. Guerin and knows him as an intellectual. Yes, he dresses as a cowboy because until the Air Force kicked him off the land he worked at a ranch. No, Jesse can not deride the young man he once maimed as a criminal. Alex is proud of all his boyfriend of twenty full hours has done. His father has no leverage to make him feel ashamed.)
-
What about the impending disaster that is Liz’s discovery of the Rosa connection? Liz would still go back to Roswell in time for the reunion. Michael very likely would even know she was coming. He would have seen her several times over the years and he wouldn’t have told Isobel about it, meaning he would have deliberately missed a chance to reinforce her avoidance of their home town via mental nudge.
The only way a catastrophe of canon proportions could be avoided is if, during the course of their years of scientific long-distance collaboration, Michael somehow got the brainwave that it truly couldn’t have been Isobel murdering the girls as his own eyes had seen. Something, perhaps in concert with his own inadvertent experience of mind-controlling a man. Perhaps being able to afford more space junk would give him a fortuitous piece of evidence. Perhaps the simple fact that less jail time for Michael equals a better relationship with Max means that at some point they’d actually talk about what happened – even more so because Michael would feel extra guilty for building a friendship with Liz behind Max’s back and thus might try and find a way out of this tangle instead of self-destruct.
And if Max and Michael both suspect that there must be a fourth alien, then after Max saves Liz’s life and the secret comes out Max would not implicate himself and/or his siblings in Rosa’s death. It would be possible to tell her of his search for the true culprit upfront. Liz likely would still want to develop a serum in self-defense but she would not be in the same immediate state of panic.
Finding out Michael was there the night her sister died, that Michael and Max together covered up what truly happened in the most incriminating-Rosa way possible all to shield Isobel, was never going to go over well. Max is a lost high school love whom she hasn’t seen in ten years. Michael is her science partner, her friend. There is no way Liz will not feel betrayed.
(However, here finally is the answer to the question Liz has asked herself for years, why the hell did Michael stay in Roswell? If it was to try his best and ensure that what happened to Rosa wouldn’t happen to others… Even if he failed because he was monitoring his sister while the fourth alien murdered countless others… It goes some way as a workable explanation. Even though it stings, hard, knowing Arturo fed him every day while he was responsible for much of the harassment he as Rosa’s father experienced.
Reconciling all this will be difficult. Finding out that Michael is Alex’s Museum Guy on top of everything else might help, if Michael ever hinted to her that he, too, had had a high school romance that he’s sometimes still hung up on despite the distance.
If Isobel still takes Liz’s serum Michael and Liz would have years of practice bouncing ideas off each other helping with their work on an antidote. Hell, even mad as all hell Liz might even rope in Michael in her serum development from the very beginning, meaning they would also work on developing an antidote at the same time. This means that Isobel would need to spend less time in her pod and more time could be put towards finding the fourth alien who, regrettably, turns out to be her husband Noah.
Now, Noah would try to destroy Liz’s work and also kill Liz for the threat she poses. With the accelerated timeline Isobel would nevertheless discover his true nature earlier. This again means that the Noah problem will have been resolved by the time Kyle and Alex have read through enough Project Sheppard files to make a trip to Caulfield.
Altogether, there will be more trust among the group. Maybe, with the Noah issue resolved, Alex would determine to take all three aliens along. With Isobel there, there is a chance that she could make Flint open the doors to free the imprisoned aliens without the whole facility being blown. Meaning that Nora lives and Michael has his mother and Alex learns about Tripp from her instead of scattered clues and the pod squad learns enough about their origins to know better later on than to free Jones… and also they learn that Theo’s child might be somewhere in the world...
The End.)