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Kyle drives back to Roswell afterwards, the smell of smoke in his nostrils, ears ringing from the explosion. There’s nothing to do, they can’t run off and tell anybody, they definitely were never supposed to be there or know Caulfield existed, so they’re just—going home. Turning around and heading back and slipping into the routines of their lives like they haven’t just seen what they’ve seen. There’s no discussion between the three of them, they merely make their way back to Kyle’s car in silence. He opens the driver’s side door, and Alex tugs Michael into the back seat, and they drive away. There’s a backpack full of hard drives and files, pulled almost at random in the haste of their necessary exit, sitting on the passenger seat. Government secrets right there beside him, but all Kyle can think of is the way Michael Guerin had sounded when he’d said these people—they’re like me!
“Michael,” Alex says quietly, but he gets no response. Kyle glances into the rear view mirror as he pulls out onto the highway, and sees that while Michael is at a window seat, Alex has chosen to sit in the center, close enough to keep his hands on him. It’s not clear if Guerin is fully registering his presence, or much of anything, really.
Kyle takes all the hurt and astonishment and grief he’s feeling right now, and tries to imagine how he’d it would be for him if he’d grown up the way Guerin had. Without a family, in the dark as to his very origins. If Kyle had seen the long lost relatives he’d never even known he had, the people who could give him the gift of his own past, and been torn away from them before they even had a chance to talk?
It’s an otherworldly sort of tragedy, that Michael Guerin has just suffered, and Kyle surprises himself with the depth of his sympathy for the guy. He wishes he could say something, but can’t imagine how to start. Back in high school he’d never been conscious of filtering his thoughts or behavior much at all. He’d felt entitled to speak his mind, had never wondered if he made life better or worse for the people around him. He’d been confident, and successful, and goddamn pleased with himself, as a Valenti, as an athlete, a bright kid with good grades, son of the sheriff, and all the rest.
As he’s grown up, he’s learned that sometimes the best thing he can do is to keep his damn mouth shut.
For now, for this moment, he’s a chauffeur. He’s getting Michael and Alex where they need to go. He supposes he needs to believe that Alex is capable of taking care of his person. His boyfriend, if that’s what they are to each other at this point. He’s seriously unclear on the specifics, although he’s been with the two of them for most of the day, long enough to see how much they care for each other.
It’s kind of sweet, in a way that makes Kyle’s chest ache. He and Alex have been spending a lot of time together recently, bonding over the shared and horrifying secrets of their families, dissecting their feelings on the man Jimmy Valenti was, the man Jesse Manes still is. So Kyle is more or less familiar with the pain Alex carries around in his body and heart and mind, day in and day out. His childhood friend-turned-research buddy deserves a bit of happiness, someone in whom he can confide.
Is Michael that guy for Alex?
Michael clearly hadn’t believed they’d find anything at Caulfield, but he’d come anyway, because Alex had asked him to. Alex had been sure Michael would say yes before he’d even asked, had told Kyle to bring the car up so they could hit the road at once. It’s an unshowy kind of loyalty and devotion, something automatic and strong.
Is Kyle ever going to be able to find that? At the moment it seems impossible, his dating pool limited to people who know the truth. Which leaves him with Liz, who’s only got eyes for Evans now, let’s be real, or Isobel, who mostly just kind of scares him, and whose evil husband is currently inside an alien pod in order to prevent him from committing more murders. God, their lives have gotten weird. Alex is kind of lucky, to be in love with the very conspiracy he’s been uncovering.
And fuck, what a conspiracy. Everything they’d found today still seems impossible, like something out of a movie or a nightmare. Kyle’s running on the adrenaline of a near-miss. He’ll fall apart about this later, when he’s able.
For now, he’s trying not to think about his dad, and aliens who cause brain tumors, and secrets and lies and the ancient, worn down figures shuffling around on the other side of that glass. The woman with the wide, expressive eyes, the way Michael had forgotten everything else but her the minute he’d seen her.
Kyle wishes he could tell him he understands what it is to lose family. That he’d be there for him as he processed, if he wanted. If only his high school self could see him now. Ha.
Of course, Michael Guerin’s obvious hatred of him makes it harder to forget high school, the person he was back then. It had started almost as soon as they’d gotten on the road out of Roswell, the sneering insinuations, mock concern: “Sure you’re comfortable in such a tight enclosed space with a couple of homos, Valenti? Wouldn’t want you to catch anything.”
Kyle had wanted to say a lot of things, but he’d kept his mouth shut, some part of him almost amused by the obviously overprotective snarl in Michael’s voice. After all, Kyle had never done anything to Michael in high school. If Alex realized he was being defended, he didn’t mention it.
Kyle remembers Guerin from those days. That annoying genius kid who never put in visible effort and yet got perfect grades. He had that cocky, irreverent attitude that worked on some teachers who seemed to see his potential, and deeply pissed off others, who spent the years with Guerin in class waging a silent battle, trying to find excuses to dock his grades when he would never quite cross the line and give them real justification.
Kyle wouldn’t have said he had much of an opinion of the guy back then. Maybe some low-level distaste for his rotation of ratty, not-quite-clean clothes, the way he always grabbed whatever extras he could manage from the hot lunch line and stuffed them in his bag, wrapped in napkins. All those subtle signs of poverty that he picked up on subconsciously. If Kyle had known Guerin was gay, or bisexual or whatever the fuck you called it, Kyle wonders if he would have had the guts to call him a fag the way he’d done to Alex. Maybe not. Guerin had been intimidating, in some ill-defined way, and Kyle, now that he looked back on it, had been nothing but a coward at the time.
He tries to layer on what he now knows. Takes his memories of Alex from high school, the stuff he tries really hard not to think about because it makes him feel like a piece of shit, and tries to splice Michael Guerin into the picture. Had they fooled around in the back of that truck that everyone said Michael slept in? Surely Jesse Manes had never known, he wouldn’t have allowed it, but apparently Kyle’s own father had, at least about the gay part, if not about Michael specifically. He finds himself weirdly, morbidly curious, not about what Guerin and Alex got up to alone together, particularly, but about some crazy star-crossed, ill-fated love story playing out right in front of his eyes that he’d never noticed because he was too busy telling himself that queers were icky and maybe contagious. God, if he’d been any kind of friend to Alex at the time, maybe he would have known all about it. He was a sucker for good gossip.
At the time, he never would have said he hated gay people. He never would have said he had anything but sympathy and compassion for the poor. He never, ever would have classified himself as the kind of person with prejudice tangled around the center of his heart. But bad people never thought they were bad, did they?
In the rear-view mirror the next time he takes a glance, Kyle sees that Guerin has shifted, his head now tucked against Alex’s shoulder. He’s still not speaking, still has that look of angry shell-shocked disbelief etched like a permanent sculpt across his face. Alex’s hand is tangled in his hair, thumb brushing a repetitive line against the skin of his neck, up and down, a lulling rhythm. Like he’s hoping Michael will drop off to sleep for at least an hour, eat up the miles back home quicker, take him away from tragedy and into the sanctuary of dreams.
Kyle knows love when he sees it. It’s why the thought of his father twists up inside him so terribly, so violently, because he knows, no matter what Jim Valenti did to innocent people, no matter the lies and the infidelity and all the rest of it, he really loved his son. And Alex Manes really loves Michael Guerin.
When Kyle had sent him after Michael there at the end, the klaxons blaring and everything urgent and fast and frantic, he’d known he might be sending Alex to his death, because he’d known Alex would never leave without Michael.
“Drop me outside of town. I need to check something.” Michael’s voice is rough and low after a solid ninety minutes of silence. He seems to be coming out of his near catatonia, at least enough to be aware of their surroundings as they near Roswell. It’s the first he’s spoken since the building exploded, and Kyle catches Alex’s flinch, the shock of movement as he tries to decide between pulling back and pushing in closer to Michael’s space. Kyle knows that kind of hopelessness. When his father had been dying, and he’d wanted to be there for his mom, he hadn’t known whether smothering her in his presence or steering clear would be the best way to keep her going.
“Michael,” Alex says quietly, a broken open tenderness that Kyle doesn’t think he’s supposed to hear. “I’ll come with you, I—”
“I can’t look at you right now,” Michael says, but he does, in fact, look at Alex as he says it, and Kyle spies on them through the mirror long enough to see the way they gaze at each other, before he tears his eyes away, throat suddenly tight. “I just mean—I can’t deal with anything but this. I can’t.”
Alex makes a sound in the back of his throat like he wants to protest, but then says, “okay. Yeah, okay, whatever you need. Anything.”
Kyle pulls off the road where Guerin indicates. He won’t tell what he’s doing, exactly, but Kyle figures it must have something to do with the secret alien pods, the recently captured Noah. He’s hesitant to let him go off alone, given his recent shock, but Michael’s his own man, and Kyle’s not his doctor. All three men sit in silence for a few seconds before Michael finally moves, letting himself out of the car. Kyle feels like they should say something, a few words for the recently deceased. But to suggest such a thing seems absurd, and he wouldn’t know how to begin.
Michael hesitates as he starts to turn towards the caves, looking up at the sky and then down at the car, eyes aimed loosely in Alex’s direction. “I might have stayed,” Michael says quietly, speaking only for Alex. “Even with her telling me to go. I might have stayed. If you hadn’t been there.”
As he walks away, Kyle wonders if that had been a thank you, or an accusation. One look at Alex’s face tells him he isn’t sure either.
When it’s just the two of them again, the space Michael’s grief had been taking up is suddenly free. Kyle fills it up with thoughts of his father again, and the images of all those old, worn out souls, hidden away from the world. Seventy years of torture.
He tries to make sense of it. To believe something ugly of the prisoners so he won’t be forced to believe something worse of his own government, his own family. Alex won’t let him get away with it. God, Alex never has let him get away with anything, has he? Alex sits there and tells him he’s part of the problem, and Kyle knows it’s true. He knows that the shitty high school version of himself, and then the person he became after his father died, the person who tried to do the right thing, all of it, all of it, is a part of the problem.
He’s got to do something about it. He’s got to find a way to make it right, no matter what it takes.