#deej writes

-

“We’re reporting live from Roswell where just before sunrise a blaze consumed a popular local haunt, the Wild Pony. One casualty has been declared with sources claiming the dental records match those of the proprietor, Maria Deluca. Witnesses say that the cause of the fire was an accident brought about by a freak lightning storm—”

-

The six of them stood vigil over the wreckage long after the camera crews and the first responders cleared out. The bright morning sun an affront to the grief and ash and soot.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Alex croaked out. He’d been crying. They all were.

Liz gave him an even gaze that prickled at the skin on the back of his neck. “No. It doesn’t.”

Nothing as human as grief could ever stop Liz Ortecho.

She sniffed out a lead, then another. By the end of the week they had Maria back.

Or at least what was left of her.

-

Kyle was taken in broad daylight. An immigration issue. Nevermind that Kyle had been born in the same hospital where they took him.

It was Alex who found the lead that time.

Correction.

They let him find it.

-

After Caulfield, Alex was well acquainted with the ins and outs of restricted facilities. About experiments and prison cells and operating theaters straight out of a Stephen King nightmare.

Having first hand experience. That was new.

They weren’t gentle as they strapped him down. Didn’t put him entirely under as they sliced him open, grafting pieces of the beautiful, hateful alien glass that he’d found in the Valenti cabin onto the nub of his missing leg.

He’d kept the artifact secret. Afraid it would be the thing that finally took Michael away from him for good.

The irony that he might die because of the glass wasn’t lost on Alex.

Or the irony that he’d been trained to withstand being tortured for information when all the information his captors cared about was in his skin and blood and bones.

There was no spark of hope when he saw the stoic figure watching from the observation deck, saw his father, but Alex called out nonetheless. Desperately grasping at the humanity he hoped still existed in the man that raised him. His pleading turned into whimpers, into screams, into raw, choked out groans until his mind forced him to black out.

Hours later, the sterile cold stirred Alex into consciousness and it was Jesse he first saw. Standing over him, smiling proudly as he murmured about the great sacrifice Alex was making for his country.

Alex gathered what little strength he had and told Jesse to go fuck himself.

When the doctors came back for more, Alex barely let out a sound. He was deep in the quiet of his mind, dreaming of tearing Jesse’s jugular out with his teeth.

-

He was never meant to survive. He was a lab rat. A guinea pig. The doctors barely contained their surprise when the alien glass willingly merged with his body, when he didn’t reject the mechanical leg they’d fashioned to work with it.

Alex welcomed every second. Keeping their focus on him meant they weren’t hunting the aliens. That he was keeping Michael safe.

They kept him in a makeshift pod in between procedures. Letting him marinate longer and longer as their interest waned. He’d been in the pod for a solid two weeks before they pulled him out again.

The agony that hit him was new.

Raucous noise scraped against Alex’s ears, the harsh buzz of the overhead lights, the sharp grating sound of metal against metal.

The sounds overwhelming his senses that he crumpled to his knees.

A giggle tore past his lips at the thought that he might finally be losing his mind.

They hauled him onto the table, buckles clanging like church bells as they strapped him in. He was left alone, but he could still hear the voices clear as day.

“We’ve gotten everything we can from him.”

“What do we do now?”

“Master Sergeant Manes gave specific orders before he left. Dispose of the subject then go after the three. We know better after the first attack. The girl first. The other two won’t fight back if we have her.”

All the previous noise disappeared into a swirling blackhole as blinding rage swept over his vision.

No.

Not Michael.

They’d carve marks into his skin. Make him scream his throat raw. Take more and more and more until there was nothing left.

Alex would die before he let that happen.

An explosive charge pulsed through him once before it ripped through his veins, blowing out every bulb in a ten mile radius and tearing through the straps that held him.

He was ready when the first person came for him. Then another. And another.

It shouldn’t have been easy to snap a neck, to break a bone, crush a ribcage, and yet somehow it was. Alex didn't leave any of them alive. He was focused on a singular mission — wipe Michael’s existence from their memory.

Dead men tell no tales.

-

He was barely conscious by the time he’d gone through every room in the facility, but he remembered—

Remembered gore. Remembered viscera. Remembered screams.

None of which were his.

He remembered staggering to a console. He remembered locking them all in with him. Remembered typing out a crude program to destroy any mention of Michael and Max and Isobel.

He remembered slumping to the floor.

Remembered pain. Remembered vomit. Remembered tears.

All of which were his.

He remembered—

He remembered the ground as it shook. Remembered the safety he’d felt because he knew. He knew.

He remembered seeing Michael.

And then it was black.

-

He slept.

For days. For weeks. For months.

Alex’s body wasn’t entirely human anymore, but the human psyche could only endure so much trauma before it receded into itself.

He slept through Max healing him. He slept through Isobel coaxing his mind open. He slept through every visit of the nurse they’d made to dress casually after Alex attacked the first one.

The only time he stirred was when Michael was around. Eyes following his every movement, fingers gripping his hand tight when he was near.

He found out later it was actually twenty four days. Twenty four days before he pushed himself up of his own accord, his gaze drawn across an unfamiliar room to the only reason he came back at all.

“Michael?”

His voice was barely a whisper, nothing more than breath vibrating through disused vocal chords, but Michael seemed to have sensed the shift in the air, his arms already around Alex before Alex even finished saying his name.

Scalding hot tears trailed down his cheeks, relief practically choking him as he gripped Michael’s shirt. He’d done it. He hadn’t hallucinated the end to his nightmare. He’d kept Michael safe.

Alex had kept Michael safe.

Hysterical laughter bubbled out of his chest despite the tears still flowing freely down his cheeks. He’d killed to keep Michael safe and he’d do it again.

Michael pulled away with nothing more than an amused shake of his head, his own face wet with tears.

“I can feel you, you know?” he asked, placing a hand against Alex’s chest. “It’s how I found you. You drove me to my knees with how much you wanted to protect me.”

Alex realized for the first time that the relief surging through him wasn’t just his. It was his and it was Michael’s, their emotions coalescing into a singular pool under Alex’s ribcage.

Curious, Alex dipped into it. He heard Michael gasp and then—

Remnants of a paralyzing fear.

Deep echoing anger.

A chasm of grief.

Alex soothed it all. Poured every inch of love he possessed into the cracks that had been left behind. Etched a promise into his soul. Into Michael’s.

“I’d burn down the world to keep you safe.”

“We’ll do it together.”

Alex surfaced grinning.

No one was going to touch either of them ever again.

-

Roswell had descended into hell while he was gone. Homes deserted. Businesses boarded up. A town populated by the ghosts who decided to stay either by choice or necessity. All of it a perdition of their own making, pushing the aliens closer and closer to the brink with every loss.

Homes obliterated.

Parents driven out of town.

Maria speaking in riddles only Isobel could understand.

Kyle still missing.

Alex’s own disappearance.

And Liz—

Liz wasn’t dead.

Not quite.

-

It was Max who took him to see her.

Liz was in a similar room as the one he’d woken up in. A gigantic, lavishly decorated room among dozens of other gigantic, lavishly decorated rooms in the mansion they had commandeered. Only Alex had been in a bed that smelled of grief and rain. Liz was in a hospital bed, hooked up to a machine that made her glow pink and purple and blue.

His mind flashed unbidden to the statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe perched on the Ortecho’s altar.

“They came for us three days after they took you,” Max said, his sandpaper voice a stark contrast to the tender brush of his knuckles against Liz’s cheek. “They destroyed the pods, our houses, leveled the junkyard. They chased us into the desert. Liz — she, she took a dart that was meant for me. It had a serum that was meant to neutralize our powers. Only in humans — it caused her cells to degenerate.“

Alex understood the machine now. Without the pod there was nowhere to keep Liz in stasis the way they did for Isobel.

“Her heart kept stopping,” Max clenched his jaw. There was no desire for absolution in his voice. Nothing but a simple stated fact. “I had to save her.”

Alex nodded once. “You killed them all.”

“There was no keeping our secret after that. The town turned on us. People I’d known since I was eight looking at us like we were strangers, like we were dangerous .”

Max looked at him, a dark humorless smirk on his face.

“Guess they were right.”

-

“Wyatt Long was first,” Michael recounted as he stroked Alex’s hair.

“Wise choice,” Alex hummed distractedly. He couldn’t stop touching Michael, his fingertips moving from his lips to his neck to his torso, greedy with the need to know he was real.

“An easy choice,” Michael said with a small laugh. “He made the mistake of stalking Isobel. Then it was a couple of his friends. The mayor’s son. The mayor himself.”

There was no inflection in his voice. Like he was rattling off a list of classmates they’d seen at the reunion rather than a list of lives Max had taken to keep Liz alive. Unlike the pods, the machine Michael built required an external power source. It required Max. Only Max wasn’t an endless fount of energy even with the desert massacre.

Alex’s fingers roamed over Michael’s biceps, his forearm. He traced over the groves of Michael’s left hand, still unused to the smooth skin.

It was a painful sort of parallel that both of them were made whole without their consent.

The thought dissolved into wisps of smoke when Michael brushed his lips against Alex’s temple. As if he’d sensed Alex’s discomfort and done it instinctively.

“It’s still a three person job keeping Liz in stasis,” Michael continued, oblivious. “I need to keep making adjustments and Iz still has to find people for Max to drain. She thinks it’s funny when she can convince them it’s the only way to make Roswell great again.”

“I’ve learned a few tricks at torture camp. I can amplify her powers, air it through a frequency so that people come to her—” Alex propped himself up on one elbow prepared to dive into a detailed explanation when suddenly a chair flew across the room and into the wall, the pure rage that echoed from Michael trembling right through him.

He raised his eyebrows in question.

“I hate it when you talk about the shit you went through like that,” Michael grumbled.

“It’s my trauma and I’ll laugh if I want to,” Alex sang softly. He nodded towards the shattered chair. “Is that what you’ll do to my father when we find him?”

“Yes.”

The smile he gave Michael was all teeth and sharp edges. “Good.”

-

Alex had always believed Isobel could rule the world if she set her mind to it. Turned out all the assistance she needed were a few dozen radio towers and one world class hacker.

“How’d it go?” Alex asked as Isobel flounced into the section of the mansion that he and Michael had taken over as a workshop-slash-command center.

“The Governor was ecstatic to welcome me as Roswell’s new mayor.”

Alex raised an eyebrow when Isobel continued to stand there, smirking like the cat that ate the canary.

“He has a little crush on me,” she admitted. “So I fucked his wife.”

Michael rolled his eyes. “Didn’t Max tell you to stop playing with your food?”

“She wanted me almost as much as he did,” Isobel replied with a shrug. “The only thing she wanted more was to kill her husband in his sleep.”

“And will she?”

The grin that broke across Isobel’s face was both beautiful and terrifying. “Our friend the Vice Governor will receive a nice little promotion by next week.”

-

Alex wasn’t entirely human but he didn’t have the kind of powers the aliens had either. His bootleg version was unreliable at worst, erratic at best. The one thing he could count on was the connection he had with Michael.

He didn’t realize that it was that connection, that protection that fed into whatever power he had.

Not until he was walking down Main Street alone, a freedom he’d only been allowed after he was able to take down the combined attacks of Max, Isobel and Michael in their training sessions. Even so he could feel Michael gently prodding their connection. As if making sure Alex was still there.

Because of that, it was curiosity not fear that made him pause when he heard the click of the firearm.

He found a group of men harassing a young woman and honestly Alex would have let them live. Probably broken a few appendages. Permanently cut off one in particular. Only they didn’t take kindly to his interruption. A shot rang out and suddenly a bullet had sliced open his shoulder.

Alex touched his fingers to the wound and it came away sticky with blood, the copper color of the desert sand as the sun descended on the horizon.

In the distance the air crackled with electricity.

The idiot waved the gun at him. “Walk away man and I won’t shoot again. She ain’t none of your business.”

“This is my favorite jacket. Do you have any idea how hard it is to break in new leather?” Alex snapped as he shrugged it off to assess the damage.

There was a muttered curse. A prayer.

It was only then that Alex saw the crisscross of lines shining through his shirt, up his neck, down his arms.

“Y—you’re one of them.”

Alex’s face split into a grin, the planes of his face lit unnaturally by the faint glow of his scars.

“Not really, but they’ll be here soon enough.”

-

The woman had run off the moment she found an opening, Isobel had taken their new friends to Max, and Michael had mostly held his tongue when Alex refused to let Max heal him.

Mostly.

“That’s going to get infected and your arm is going to fall off,” Michael said, unable to help himself after seeing Alex eye a tube of superglue. They were both fresh from the shower and while Alex’s wound was clean and ready for bandaging, it still needed stitches.

“Max is barely on his feet trying to keep Liz alive and no doctor is coming near me.”

Michael ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “Fine. If you don’t want Max to heal you then let me do it.”

That made Alex pause. “Since when can you heal people?”

“I never have,” Michael admitted, sitting next to Alex on the bed and giving him a soft, sweet kiss, “but you’ve always been my exception.”

Alex rolled his eyes fondly at the cheesy line but nodded.

There was a moment when Michael hesitated, his hand hovering a little too far to be effective, but Alex placed his hand on Michael’s, drawing him close.

Michael cupped Alex’s cheek with his other hand and in the next breath, liquid gold bloomed over Alex’s skin.

He barely noticed as muscle and sinew reformed under Michael’s touch. A lightning storm of overwhelming love was sparking through him, from him, leaving Michael-shaped burns in its wake.

Alex was grateful to know it wasn’t just him, a moan rumbled in Michael’s chest and suddenly his lips were on Alex’s, tongue sliding into his mouth, wet and dirty while his other hand moved down, groping every inch of bare skin he could reach.

It took no time before Alex was on his back, Michael riding him, one hand still on Alex’s shoulder as he rocked his hips, slow and steady, driving them both crazy in a feedback loop of pleasure.

Alex trembled, lights flickering around them as his control loosened. “Michael— I— I’m—”

“I’ve got you, darling,” Michael promised. “I’ve always got you.”

-

They rescued Kyle on a Friday.

Michael didn’t think it counted as date night.

Alex figured they could kill two birds with one stone.

Or a whole flock of them as the case may be.

Red warning lights flashed overhead as he and Michael walked hand in hand down the underground facilities’ corridors. Alex hummed softly to the beat, easily introducing the sound of Michael snapping soldiers’ necks into his symphony.

“We should go dancing.”

“Anything for you.” Michael winked cheekily as he wiped a splatter of blood off Alex’s cheek.

-

Kyle was in a slightly better state than Alex had been, but it still took two weeks before Isobel was able to reach into his mind without getting flung across the room.

When he finally emerged it was to Alex sitting at his bedside. Going from an endless slumber to leveling Alex with a heavy gaze. Contained within was an intimate knowledge that drove a blade right between Alex’s ribs and lodged itself there for them both to see.

“He took you too.”

Alex gripped Kyle’s hand tight. “I’m going to kill him.”

In another life Kyle would have counseled against it. Would have lectured Alex about the Valenti Code, about doing good and taking the high road. In this one, Alex stared into the broken eyes of a boy he once called his best friend and found a kindred spirit.

“Do it slowly.”

In the end not even his code could save Kyle’s soul.

-

Kyle was the key to getting Liz off the machine. It didn’t stop there. There was too much at stake. Too many times that they’d been caught off guard.

They razed the organization that had been out to get the aliens. Expanded their control beyond the city limits. Persuaded politicians and billionaires and warmongers into their fold. They had the power. All Isobel needed was their will.

Jesse Manes eluded them through it all. A cockroach surviving a nuclear holocaust. He might have had the tenacity to outlive them, but Alex made an oath. A Manes Man was always a man of his word.

He felt it before the program even let out its telltale ping. A shiver up his spine telling him that everything was falling into place. That this new world they’d created would soon be the one he’d promised to Michael.

Strong arms wrapped around his shoulders and Alex sank into them easily. They had a whole universe left to conquer, but first he had family business he needed to finish.

-