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ashesandhalefire · 2 years

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i know you're fine (but what do i do) - 1/4

Not being with Michael and wanting to be with Michael while trying to be with someone else is, in a word, frustrating.

Alex's act of catharsis, done in the throes of alcohol-fueled irritation, becomes harder to walk back than expected, and suddenly the only way onward is forward.

or: Alex gets drunk, somebody has sticky fingers, and nobody wants to talk about their feelings.

(Set after season 2. Not season 3 canon-compliant.)

Edit: post reformatted to contain the full text of chapter one. also available on ao3 here.

Forrest lingers before he leaves—taking his time to carefully undo the laces on his boots and retie them instead of forcing his foot back through the loosened collar, insisting on washing his water glass from dinner, making it all the way to the front door before realizing his jacket is still on the couch in the living room—and Alex knows he wants an invitation to stay. He wants Alex to say that it’s dark and cold and late and that Forrest should just borrow some sweatpants. But the day started with lunch on the patio, stretched into a casual afternoon spent lazing around the living room, and led to a late dinner of delivery Thai food, and Alex still has his migraine from that morning.

The ache had pulsed at his temples when Forrest first showed up with a shopping bag of wrapped deli sandwiches and a smile, and Alex had been as grateful for the distraction as he was irritated by the obligation to play host while he waited for his Excedrin to kick in. Hidden in the shade of the patio umbrella, he sipped miserably at a glass of water and tried to offer Forrest placating smiles and interested hums in place of conversation. They aren’t at a place where Alex can admit to discomfort.

Eventually, they’ll relax into comfortable familiarity without pretense. Alex won’t feel like he has to put on his prosthesis or straighten the couch pillows before Forrest comes into the house. He won’t worry about his drink options or whether the clutter on his dining room table should be hidden away. Suffering through the smell of an Italian hero while nursing a raging hangover won’t be something he does out of embarrassed politeness. Their silences will be comfortable and natural. Everything will click.

At least, that’s Kyle’s working theory.

The night before, in the back corner of Planet 7, Kyle had listened to him recite the play-by-play of his last date with Forrest—a day trip to a gallery in Santa Fe where Alex felt like his lack of interest in modern art was somehow amusing Forrest and irritating him simultaneously—and nodded. Sitting back in the booth, he sipped his absurdly blue drink and said, “I mean, it sounds like a nice time. Kind of. You seeing him again soon?”

“Yeah, tomorrow. We’re supposed to have lunch.”

Kyle snorted. “You look thrilled.”

Shrugging, Alex guided beads of condensation down the side of his beer bottle with his index finger. Kyle waited, patiently bobbing his head to the music, and Alex sighed. He liked confiding in Kyle, even if the opportunity seemed to come accompanied by glitter-coated feather boas and a blonde bartender that he couldn't stand more and more frequently, but some days felt more like therapy sessions than conversations. Hardwired for making diagnoses, Kyle had a tendency to talk Alex through dating as if encouraging a patient with atrophied muscles. Sometimes it was helpful. Sometimes it wasn’t.

“I’m— I’m trying to figure out what I’m supposed to feel and when I’m supposed to feel it. I don’t have much experience with the standard timeline.”

“I don’t think there is a standard timeline.”

“But I should be more...invested.” He started folding his napkin so he wouldn’t have to look Kyle in the eyes and see judgment or, worse, pity. Methodically, Alex lined up the corners and creased the 1-ply paper down the middle. He turned the napkin and creased it again. “We’ve been taking things slow. Because we’re both busy, and I have...hang-ups. But I think he’s ready for more, and I— I’m not there.”

Kyle nodded. “That’s okay.”

“Is it?” He stared at the napkin. “When we first met, I was interested. He— I think he’s attractive. But now when I think about— about going further, it just seems like it would be...hollow. And I’m not interested in that. Does that make sense?”

Kyle considered him thoughtfully. “Yeah. I felt like that for a while after I broke up with my girlfriend in junior year at Michigan. You’re used to something...intense. Something that felt special to you. But if you like him, I don’t think it would be hollow. I just think it would be different.” Kyle was kind enough not to mention Michael by name, but he did reach out to pluck the folded napkin square from Alex’s hands to force eye contact. “And different isn’t always a bad thing.”

Alex finished his beer and ended up ordering two more before switching to something harder.

That was the last they said about it, Kyle turning his attention to the DJ instead, but Alex’s skepticism, combined with his higher than average blood alcohol content, left him pacing the hallway with his crutch into the early hours of the morning. He gave up on lying sleeplessly in bed to hunch over his desk in threadbare pajamas, scratching out a list of pros and cons on the back of a takeout menu. Aggravated by the twinges of phantom pain in his right leg, his mood had soured the longer he stayed up, and the marks from his pen got darker and angrier on the paper pamphlet. Eventually, brow wrinkled with irritation, he stumbled out into the kitchen on one crutch to look for another drink. He gulped down a glass of water and, when it didn’t satisfy, went for the whiskey on the bookshelf in the living room.

A gift from when Alex got his captaincy, the bottle was mostly decoration. His drinking had increased in recent months, however, likely from sheer proximity to so many functioning alcoholics. The lingering burn of one short pull singed the back of his throat, and Alex readjusted his grip on the crutch as he stared at the neat row of books in front of him. Most were foreign editions of his favorite paperbacks, repurchased secondhand overseas after his original collection ended up in a dumpster as a casualty of his father’s indiscriminate rage. The corners were dulled from wear.

He tilted three of the books forward to rest on their cracked spines. Reaching to the back of the shelf, he ran his fingers blindly along the wood until he found the flimsy black plastic of a cheap photo booklet.

Only big enough to hold one 4”x6” photograph on each page, the small album was a giveaway from a birthday party that survived the post-graduation purge of his childhood bedroom in the bottom of a narrow shoe box his father never thought to check. It smelled as horribly of petroleum as the day it was extruded, even after time spent in the different hiding places Alex found for it over the years. All of the pages were blank except one, buried halfway through.

Alex flipped through the plastic pages until the booklet fell open in his palms and the familiar face of a girl he didn’t know stared up at him. Over and over, he had rehearsed saying Hannah’s the prettiest girl I never dated until it sounded wistful enough to be believable. But he’d never had to say it. Nobody had ever found the album or seen not-Hannah’s picture. And the second photograph, the one that mattered, stayed safely hidden, tucked behind her smiling face.

Two weeks after his hand was crushed, Michael found an old disposable camera and insisted on taking pictures when they were out in the desert, happily ignoring Alex’s advice not to get his hopes up about anything developing correctly. Alex never saw any of those photos. He assumed the camera, like so many things that summer, got lost in Michael’s chaos. Maybe it was in a box in his trailer. Maybe it was in a landfill a few towns over. Maybe it was still in the personal property inventory at the sheriff’s station, never reclaimed.

But he had liked the idea. Liz kept a collage of photographs on the wall in the Crashdown’s kitchen, and something like jealousy had always bubbled in the pit of his stomach when they took the back staircase up to her bedroom and he got a good look at the cork board. The next time Michael suggested going for a ride, Alex brought along Jim Valenti’s digital camera.

He nearly had a panic attack at the self-serve kiosk in the convenience store the next weekend when he tried to develop the pictures, and he left with only one print. Jim needed the camera back not long after. Alex reformatted the memory card before he returned it, and the other photographs were lost.

Alex had one memento hidden away in the bottom of his backpack the day he left for basic training. It was one of the few mementos he still had.

He struggled to handle the album, the whiskey, and his crutch at the same time as he eased himself down onto the bench in front of the keyboard. Finally, his crutch slipped away and clattered to the floor, and Alex took one last disgusted sip before putting the bottle of whiskey down on the coffee table. His fingers were sloppy as he pulled the photograph out from behind not-Hannah.

Old as it was, the photograph never had a chance to fade. That always surprised him. Usually when he found himself looking for the picture, he was trying to temper his anger with wistfulness. He hoped the nostalgia might help, but the picture never looked as old as it was. Bright and crisp, it could have been taken a week ago. The only giveaways were the way Alex was dressed and the warm, open smile on Michael's face. Those days felt unbearably far away sometimes.

The anger came easily.

His love life had him drunk and pacing his halls at three in the morning. He should have been asleep. Or, at the very least, he should have been kept awake by excitement for seeing his boyfriend tomorrow. He shouldn’t have been making lists and charts to convince himself he was happy. And he definitely shouldn’t have been pining after someone that didn’t want him anymore.

Michael made it so easy to be angry.

Alex hated his anger, hated the way it twisted his face up to look more like his father’s. He tried not to feel it. Sometimes, he was able to shut it down completely. Sometimes, he was able to find empathy instead. But feelings festered, and whatever good will he had offered Michael in the last few months was turning sour, pickled in resentment and whiskey.

Michael moved on so easily. He changed his mind and was happy. There was no adjustment period, no awkward misery stirred up out of nowhere that ruined the lighthearted mood of dating someone new. Alien dramas aside, Michael fell into a new relationship with ease. He hadn’t had to talk himself into wanting someone that wasn’t Alex. He’d gone looking for it. From the start, it had been the easier option, the better option.

On the pro side of his Forrest list, Alex had somewhat desperately listed neat penmanship. In the face of that, it wasn’t hard to guess that he has probably been ruined for other people.

So Alex did what felt right. He took another long gulp from the bottle of whiskey, threw the picture into the trash can full of scrapped song notes, and went to bed without setting his alarm.

Remembering the alcohol-fueled dramatics now makes his headache worsen.

He refolds the blanket Forrest had used and slings it over the back of the chair, and he stacks the coasters into their holder. Easing his knee against the piano bench, he tucks it beneath the keyboard. The plastic album still sits on the third shelf of the bookcase where he tossed it the night before, so he grabs it from between the paperbacks and flips it open.

“Don’t judge me,” he says to not-Hannah. They’ve done this dance before.

When he bends over the garbage bin, the picture is gone.

He pulls out the crumpled remains of a half-finished song and tosses them onto the floor. The picture isn’t there. He digs through another layer of discarded paper, and then he frowns when his fingertips hit the plastic bottom of the pail. Hands twitching, he upends the pail on the living room floor and stares at the spilled balls of paper, all dotted with his own chicken scratch.

“Where’d you go?” Alex says to the room. He checks behind the keyboard, beneath the corner of the area rug, and between the legs of the upholstered chair, but the picture is nowhere to be found. Easing across the floor on his knees, he wedges his fingers into the narrow crack between the bookshelf and the wall and feels along the molding. “No, no, no. You’re here somewhere. Where are you?”

He remembers tossing it into the pail beside the keyboard. But his blood was probably more alcohol than it was water at that point, so he climbs back to his feet and goes to check the pail in his bedroom. When he finds that one empty except for a few tissues, he goes to the bathroom, where he finds nothing, and then his office. He even darts out to the garage to check the yard waste bin. The picture isn’t in any of them. Stumbling back inside and down the hallway, Alex swears to himself, and then he pulls the swinging lid off the trash can in the kitchen.

The only visible garbage is the remnants of the night’s dinner.

“Before that,” he mutters, pulling out the empty paper containers and tossing them onto the counter. The wrappers from lunch sit below in crumpled balls, and he shoves them aside. Something cold touches his fingertips, and his stomach sinks as he thinks about the leftovers he scraped out the morning before. He might be able to wipe off coffee grounds with minimal staining, but this many hours of liquid exposure will have ruined it.

He flips the trash can, and four days’ worth of garbage spill out onto the floor. Half-eaten yogurt cups and eggshells and frozen broccoli he hadn’t had the heart to reheat a third time splatter across the tile. Prosthesis jarring, Alex goes to his knees in the middle of the mess and paws through the rubble, tossing food scraps and dirty napkins to the side. He touches every piece of trash, and then he checks the bag inside the can in case it got stuck, but the photograph isn’t there.

It can’t have gotten up and walked away.

He has the phone dialed before his brain catches up with his body, and he sits on the kitchen floor with his back against the refrigerator while the call rings through. His knuckles turn white beneath the smears of burnt toast crumbs and pan grease as he grips the phone against his ear.

“Are we doing goodnight calls now? Didn’t take you for the type, Manes, but I’m game.” Forrest sounds amused, like he’s talking through a smile, and the darkest parts of Alex hate him with a ferocity that is his father’s bloodline, through and through. “I can whisper sweet nothings with the best of them.”

“Why did you take it?”

A half-beat of silence crackles over the line, and then, voice still politely amused, Forrest asks, “What?”

“It was here last night, and now it’s not here. I looked through the whole can— I looked through all the cans, and it’s not here. It’s not anywhere. That means somebody took it. I want to know where it is.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Forrest says, “but I think you need to take a breath and calm down.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” Alex snaps, squeezing the bridge of his nose. His skull throbs in time with his rabbiting heartbeat. “It was here, and now it’s not. You can’t— you can’t just come into my house and take things.”

“Whoa,” Forrest says, tone turning sharper than Alex ever recalls hearing. He might be excited for the friction if it was about anything else. “I didn’t steal anything from you. That’s not my song, and you know it. And I don’t appreciate being accused.”

“It didn’t disappear on its own.”

Forrest takes a deep breath. “I’m going to chalk this up to it being past your bedtime.”

And then he hangs up.

Alex stares at his phone in his trembling hand, watching the screen fade to black as the auto-lock feature engages, and then he kicks out his leg and sends the plastic garbage can flying across the floor. It bangs against the drywall in the hallway, leaving a scuff in the paint, and his phone almost follows. The anger bubbles in his chest as he lifts his clenched hand to his mouth and screams into his knuckles.

Cutting off in a hiccough, the sound gets trapped in his throat by welling panic. He surveys the mess in front of him.

This is what impulsivity gets him: regret, misery, and the shame of sitting sprawled on his garbage-littered kitchen floor, smeared with stains and fighting away hot, angry tears with the cuffs of his sweatshirt sleeves.

While the security camera footage buffers on his laptop, Alex hunts down a spare USB drive. If he has to drive across town and throw the evidence in Forrest’s face, he will.

He considers himself a decent judge of character. Admittedly, his recent track record has been littered with mistakes, but those were the product of letting his sentimentality get in the way. He put his trust in people who didn’t deserve it out of loyalty to memories, and he won’t be repeating that anytime soon. But he usually has good instincts with strangers. Besides being a Long, which Alex can hardly hold against him given his own surname, and having an obsession with war criminals from the 1940s, Forrest hasn’t raised any red flags before now. There hasn’t been anything to indicate he might be overbearingly jealous. He’d told Alex his song about longing for a mysterious ex-lover to return was good, using words like heart-wrenching and emotionally resonant.

But stealing pictures out of trash cans feels like a significant flag.

And there isn’t even anything inherently romantic about the picture—except, maybe, the fact that Alex has kept it for ten years—which hints at a strain of possessiveness Alex doesn’t like.

USB in hand, he settles into his desk chair and plays the footage from the night before. Kyle, obviously significantly more sober, helps him out of their Uber and up the driveway, and Alex goes inside to struggle out of his fitted jeans. He speeds through the hour of restless tossing and turning and furious list-writing, and he winces as he watches himself in the living room, coughing and sputtering over a swig of whiskey. He looks especially pathetic as he falls onto the piano bench and drops his crutch, but a few moments later he tosses the photograph into the trash can beside the keyboard, just like he remembers.

With at least one mystery solved, he skips through to the next day’s early afternoon when Forrest arrives, greeting him with a peck on the cheek and leading with his bag of sandwiches when he eases in the door, and scrubs past the time they spent together in the kitchen and outside on the patio.

When they come back inside, Forrest goes to the bathroom while Alex dumps their paper plates into the kitchen trash, and then they make their ways to the living room. Forrest sits at the keyboard, and Alex, watching with his attention glued to the trash can, slows the footage back to regular speed.

Nothing happens.

Forrest plunks his way, one-fingered, through a rudimentary version of Ode to Joy while he explains that his grandmother taught piano lessons when he was younger but he never picked up anything more than basic skills. He singsongs each note as he plays: E, E, F, G, G, F, E, D, C, C, D, E, E, D, D. Alex watches himself manage to look vaguely charmed by it, but the smile on his lips doesn’t quite reach his eyes. If his current mood wasn’t making him so ungenerous, he might be willing to say it could’ve been from the agitation of his lingering headache.

With the initial thrill of something new worn off, most of Forrest’s anecdotes and hobbies seem horribly misaligned with Alex’s own interests. What they have in common is mostly surface level: writing music, being gay, military service, and not much else. But Alex has been trying to be adaptable since it’s difficult to introduce new people to the bunker club where he’s co-president. If they’re going to find common ground, it isn’t going to be on Alex’s property.

A dot appears in one corner of the screen, signaling that the doorbell is ringing.

He excuses himself from the living room, leaving Forrest alone. Forrest changes octaves, moving his hands up the keyboard as he begins another refrain, and he turns towards the hallway. The way he leans back seems as though he’s straining to hear what’s going on. Then, he seems to sigh and curl back towards the keyboard. Rapt with attention, Alex watches him shift his weight on the bench and look around, fingers still mindlessly plunking through the song for what must be the seventh time.

The camera catches movement of an approaching shadow in the hallway, and Michael suddenly appears around the corner of the wall.

Alex frowns, tapping his thumb on the space bar to pause the video. Michael had stopped by to pick up paperwork in the late afternoon, but Alex left him waiting on the porch while he collected it. Michael hadn’t come inside. Except, according to the blurred image on the screen, apparently he had.

Licking his lips, Alex fights back the uneasy feeling welling in his stomach and presses the space bar again.

Michael stares across the living room, distaste evident on his face, and then he takes a deep breath. He says something Alex can’t discern from his pixelated lips, and Forrest turns around on the piano bench. With a laugh, Forrest answers and gestures awkwardly at Alex’s chicken scratch sheet music on the stand. Michael shakes his head. Forrest fiddles with his rings.

They are not friends.

Forrest had intuited fairly quickly that there were parts of Alex’s life he could become a part of through sheer pleasantness. Liz and Kyle have been especially receptive. Michael, for all their familiarity at the library, has warranted a different, more patient approach. It hasn’t been successful so far, and Alex is more than a little grateful for it. His personal life has been enough of a convoluted mess lately without Forrest and Michael being anything beyond casual acquaintances.

On the screen, Michael rounds the back of the chair and crosses to the keyboard. Forrest points at a particular spot on the sheet music before bending to study it closer. He has difficulty deciphering Alex’s handwriting sometimes, especially when it’s squeezed into the narrow margins of heavily-edited sheet music. Fingers scratching at his neck as he squints, Forrest pauses. His head tilts, and Alex realizes that he’s waiting for a second opinion.

But Michael’s attention is caught elsewhere, his head turned just to the left of the keyboard and down.

Forrest speaks again, sitting back with a slouch, and Michael snaps his head around. He makes a show of shrugging his shoulders, and then takes a step back and looks towards the hallway. A few moments of palpable awkwardness follow, and then Forrest stands up. He takes his half-full glass and carries it to the table in the dining room where Alex left the water pitcher.

The second his attention turns away, Michael twitches his fingers behind his back and the photograph dances up over the rim of the trash can and into his hand. He slips it into his back pocket and walks away.

Forrest pauses mid-sip, his attention caught on something down the hall, and he turns around as Michael comes up behind him. He jerks a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the front door, and Michael brushes past him with a curt nod. He disappears into the hallway, beyond the camera’s view, and Alex scrambles to shuffle through the feeds. The footage catches up to him as he bursts out onto the front porch and jams his hat back on his head.

Alex watches himself appear as a shadow in the background, and then he steps out onto the porch with the folders in hand. He holds them out to Michael.

Thanks, he watches Michael say with a sniff and a wrinkle of his nose.

You know what to do when you’re done.

Yeah, I got it. He tucks the folders under his arm. Don’t want anything left behind.

Michael turns away without really saying goodbye, and Alex goes back into the house.

The second exterior camera on the far corner of the house catches Michael taking the photograph out of his back pocket before sliding into his truck and slamming the door shut. He stares at the picture for a few beats before lifting his head to look up at the house through the windshield. At such a distance, the footage is too pixelated to read his expression, but it’s clear enough to see how he throws the picture onto the dashboard and slams his fist against the steering wheel.

When the truck reverses out of Alex’s driveway, the photograph sits wedged up against the windshield.

Alex shuts his laptop and reaches for his keys.

The dashboard clock ticks just past eleven thirty when Alex pulls up to the junkyard, and he finds Michael sitting outside the Airstream. He doesn’t look up when the headlights splash across the yard or when Alex cuts the engine of his car. Staring at the flickering fire in the pit in front of him, he rolls the bottom of a mostly full beer bottle against the arm of his salvaged patio chair.

“Give it back,” Alex demands as he slams the car door behind him. His fingers close into a fist around his keys, and the metal teeth bite into his palm. If he squeezes much harder, he’s going to be leaving blood on the desert floor for the second time in his life.

Michael doesn’t outright deny the theft, but he also doesn’t acknowledge the accusation. Instead, he scoops his hat off the chair beside him, tucks it down over his curls, and stretches his legs out in front of himself. “Nice to see you too, bro.”

Even full of as much blustering irritation as Alex is, he stops short. Things between Michael and himself have been decent for the last few weeks. He wouldn’t go so far as to say good, since he hates the no-man’s-land between hostility and friendship they’ve been loitering in for the last few months. But they’ve been able to be around each other without the rawness of open wounds feeling so obvious, and now Michael is circling back to the beginning.

As he stands on the other side of the fire pit, heat from the flames licking at his already flushed cheeks, Alex crosses his arms and tries to ignore the smoke irritating the back of his throat and sharpening the edges of his headache. “Where is it?”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I have security cameras, Guerin. Don’t lie to me.” He exhales heavily. “You can’t— you can’t sneak into my house and take things. Now, where is it?”

Shrugging, Michael leans back in his chair. He holds Alex’s gaze until his attention drifts to the fire. He watches the flames lick their way along the broken pieces of an old wooden shipping pallet, and then he follows the glowing embers that catch in the breeze and float into the sky. Then, he looks back at Alex.

Stomach rolling, Alex takes a half-step forward and looks down at the kindling. In the heart of the fire, he sees the charred edge of the folder he gave Michael that afternoon. A knot forms in his throat. When Alex gives out printouts, which he has to do now since Michael doesn’t have a computer and they’re not really in a cooperative research place, each folder is neatly labeled in the upper right-hand corner with BAR. The instruction isn’t subtle—burn after reading—but Alex had forced the agreement to destroy anything sensitive to save himself the ulcer from worrying about classified information floating around Michael’s chaotic trailer.

“You burned it.”

“Just doing what you told me. Nothing left behind.”

“That wasn’t in the folders.”

Michael takes a sip from his beer. “What’s the difference? You were throwing it away.”

Alex wants to tell him, I wasn’t, wants to tell him, getting over you is something I have to work at every single day, wants to tell him, I’ve thrown that picture out more times than I can count and it never helps at all, wants to tell him, it’s the only one I have.

But Michael seems to be spoiling for a fight. His posture is loose and relaxed, and his eyes are hard and cold. It’s been almost a year since Michael made it clear he wanted nothing to do with Alex or his mess of feelings. It’s been two months since he walked out in the middle of a love song Alex had no business singing. And he still has demons to excise from their history, apparently, because just the sight of Alex’s last memento has sent him spiraling back to pre-reunion levels of acidic animosity.

Reading the vacant look in his eyes is easy. He wants Alex to say that his feelings are hurt just so he can show how little he cares. The retaliating punch is always so much sharper than the initial jab.

“Fine,” Alex says, hands curling into fists as he lowers his arms to his sides. His keys jangle, the sound too delicate in the air between them. He used to like the Airstream and its makeshift flowerbed in the middle of the junkyard. It was the soft, gooey center of Michael’s world. But it feels different now, like looking at the hollow mechanical heart of a machine he doesn’t understand. “Thanks for taking care of it for me.”

He turns around and goes back to his car. He drives home, taking carefully measured breaths through his nose, and he goes to bed. For the second night in a row, sleep doesn’t come easily.

He calls Forrest the next morning to apologize after he finishes cleaning up the mess in the kitchen.

“I lost something important,” he says, aware of how vague it sounds. Forrest doesn’t push, either because he’s still irritated or because he wants to give Alex growing time. For all that he says he has no interest in waiting out someone else’s process, he certainly likes to think he’s fostering some sort of metamorphosis. As long as Alex follows quickly enough, Forrest is perfectly happy to lead. Rubbing a hand over the lines of stress on his forehead, Alex shuts his eyes. “I— I think I had a panic attack.”

“You definitely had a panic attack.” Forrest hesitates. “But you sound better. Did you at least find what you were looking for?”

Alex swallows around the tangled ball of emotions in his throat, sadness and fury wrestling endlessly. “Yeah, I know where it is.”

“Good. Whatever it was, you should keep it somewhere safe. And write down where you keep it. And text somebody else where you wrote it down.”

“I’m sorry,” Alex says again, squeezing his eyes shut to avoid looking at the bookshelf where the edge of the plastic album is visible. “I flipped out on you.”

“Apology accepted. And, honestly, the number of innocent librarians I have traumatized after losing working drafts of my book has to be in double digits. I get it. We all lose our cools now and then.” The admission is an olive branch, offering Alex the chance to stop being embarrassed and share a little more about what upset him.

“Yeah.”

He doesn’t rise to the occasion. After two months of museum dates and casual lunches, there’s no good way to say I had a panic attack and accused you of theft because I lost a ten-year-old picture of my ex-boyfriend, who hates me now and who I’m still in love with and who was barely even my boyfriend in the first place. Forrest has been gracious about taking things slow, which is an admittedly low bar, but this is the kind of thing that will have him cutting his losses, and Alex has suffered through too much polite getting-to-know-you small talk to scrap it and start over with somebody else.

After he hangs up, he makes the decision that things are going to be different going forward. Things are going to get better.

Of all his secrets, Michael always feels the most impossibly complex. He’s never had to worry about explaining it to anyone else, which is a good thing because he struggles enough explaining it to himself. They were together, but they weren’t, and they shared trauma, but they didn’t. And with everything wrapped up inextricably in aliens and generational government conspiracies, Alex had convinced himself that something about Michael was inevitable. It was destiny. But whatever part of him has been holding on to the slim hope that Michael might want him again after all of this, that they might find their way back to each other one last time, has been thoroughly shamed. It turned, tuck-tailed, and ran out of the junkyard the night before.

He can’t keep wanting Michael to want him. If nothing else, Michael has made it clear that he’s closed that chapter of his life. Maybe Alex ruined it a long time ago, out in the desert, because he isn’t even a second choice anymore, a fallback to break up the loneliness. He remembers everything about standing in his driveway while Michael broke his heart: the taste of exhaust that lingered in the air, the rustling of wind through the trees, the way the lights on his patio turned to starbursts at the corners of his vision while he tried to bite back the sudden, sharp welling of rejection. But that was all distraction, pomp that kept him from the truth of what was happening. It’s a stinging realization that Alex never lost out to someone else. He just lost out.

He has to move on now and mean it. Half-assing it isn’t getting him anything but heartache.

#malex fic #malex #rnm fic #roswell new mexico #michael x alex #my fic #it's all written so now i just have to get it all posted before monday oh boy

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