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It doesn’t happen fast. That’s the thing Maria will think about later, on the drive back to Michael’s Airstream, with Alex clinging to a semi-conscious Michael next to her on the bench of the truck. You’d think it would be a blur, that she’d have trouble piecing together exactly what had happened, and how, and in what order, but no.
No. Time had slowed down when it had happened. She’d seen every horrible millisecond, and she hadn’t been able to stop it.
Alex, stumbling outside with his hand covering a wound in his chest. “Son of a bitch stabbed me,” he’d said, sounding more annoyed than injured. Michael and Maria had both run towards him, and Maria had remembered thinking thank god, we’re all together, we can get out of here, it’s over.
And then there had been a man behind them, a man in front of them. Michael has his gun up, and Maria turns to stand in his path, the truth hitting her like a lightning bolt.
A shot goes off.
And then another.
Maria sees Travis stumble as a bullet clips him in the shoulder, but he doesn’t go down. He turns, stumbling off back towards the corn field. His twin curses and runs to follow.
And simultaneously, Maria hears a muffled grunt of disbelief from right beside her, and a body knocks into hers as it falls, a spray of blood misting in the air in front of her face. She turns to see, and loses track of everything but the sight of Alex hitting the ground, limbs an awkward tangle, shirt stained with a rapidly expanding pool of red in the dim light.
“Oh fuck,” Michael says, which Maria frankly thinks might be an underreaction, that’s a lot of blood, and then they’re both on the ground at the same time, kneeling over Alex, moving their hands around on his chest like they can erase the evidence of the wound with their very touch.
“Shit,” Michael hisses. “Alex. Alex, can you hear me?”
“He shot him,” Maria says, aware that this is obvious, aware that saying it changes nothing, but— “I didn’t think he had a gun, he had a fucking pitchfork, oh my god, Michael, oh my god—”
“Hey,” Michael says, and he’s not looking at Maria at all, his hands are scrabbling around on Alex’s chest, looking for the right place to put pressure. His eyes are flicking between Alex’s face and chest, and Maria, her own hands stained red, pulls out her phone. Still no service. They’re on their own, and Alex is—Alex is— “Hey, Alex, come on—”
Michael is still talking to him, still begging him to answer, but Maria, phone clenched tightly in one hand and the other pressed against her racing heart, knows that her best friend is dead.
She can feel it, someplace deep down inside her, beyond intuition or dread or anything else. Alex is dead. Alex is gone, Alex—Alex—she’d spent a whole decade worried that he’d get himself killed overseas, and every time he’d scoffed at her and reminded her in his emails and phone calls that he was a code breaker, not someone out there on the front lines, she’d told him to be careful all the same. He’d come back home to her with a missing leg, but she’d thought the worst was over. She hadn’t seen this coming. She hadn’t for one second thought it possible, that she could lose—that she would—
Alex had said some stupid thing about the gay guy dying first, they’d joked about it, and now he’s—
Maria is only aware that she’s screaming and crying, calling out Alex’s name, when Michael tells her to shut up, his voice lancing through the air like a whip.
“Stop. Shut up, Maria, stop. He’s not. It’s not. He can’t—” Michael’s hands are drenched in red, in Alex’s blood, god, it’s too horrible, he’s pressing on the wound, but Alex’s face has gone slack, his body the type of still that it wouldn’t be if he were writhing in pain from a gunshot wound to the chest, and if he’s not writhing in pain that means—
“He’s not dead!” Michael yells, and he presses his palm firmly to Alex’s chest, and his other hand to his own heart, he squeezes his eyes shut, breathing in deep, gulping gasps. Maria can see tears streaming rapidly down his face, teeth cutting hard into his lower lip, every muscle in his body locked and concentrated. “Come on, Alex,” he says, like he’s trying to coax a skittish animal out from under a car, trying to will the impossible with the force of sheer need and nothing more. “Come on, you can do this, you can. You can do this.”
“Michael,” she croaks, her voice sounding inhuman even to her own ears, but Michael ignores her, and even as she watches, the light from the trailer behind them grows bright, too bright, and then shorts out in a shower of sparks. The air around Michael is fizzing and glowing, the static electricity standing all the hairs on Maria’s body on end. Michael lets out a frustrated scream, the hand on Alex’s chest shaking, fingers grasping hard into the fabric of the ruined shirt.
“Michael,” she tries again. “Michael, what are you—”
The energy dies away as suddenly as it had arrived, and Michael sways where he’s kneeling over Alex’s body, his breath coming too fast, too hard. He drops the hand that had been over his own heart down to Alex’s face, cups a palm around it, turning it to face him more fully. “Fuck. No. Alex, please.”
“Did you just—”
“Didn’t work,” Michael says numbly. He looks up at Maria blankly, like he’s not even seeing her, and Maria sees a trail of blood coming out of his nose. “I can’t, I’m not the healer. Max—we need to get him to Max—”
“He’s—” Maria’s voice catches on the word, she has to swallow three times before she can say it. “He’s gone, Michael. I think he’s gone.”
The look on Michael’s face is like nothing she’s ever seen before, some terrible rictus of fury and disbelief, every muscle in his body locked down like he’s been frozen in place, frozen inside this horrible, unreal moment. Maria will never be able to close her eyes without reliving this again, she thinks. She’s crying still, a loud, wailing call of grief, but she has no control over it, over what she’s saying. Can barely hear her own voice over the pounding of her heart in her ears. She wants to say Michael’s name, wants to pull Alex’s body into her arms and shake him until she erases it, sets back the clock, brings him back to where she is, where he belongs.
Finally, eventually, in the growing stillness of the worst moment of her entire life, Maria reaches with trembling hands towards Alex’s face. She’s dissociating, can feel the reality of the moment fleeing from her, leaving a cold shell behind, but something in her wants to close Alex’s eyes. She’s seen that, in movies. His eyes should be closed—
“Don’t touch him.”
Michael’s voice is a snarl of pure black rage, and when Maria flinches and looks at him, she sees that Michael has not taken his eyes off of Alex’s face, had caught her motion from the corner of his eye and forestalled her.
“Michael.”
“Back off.”
“Michael—”
“No!”
She scrambles back on her knees a few feet away from Alex—from—from the body. She has the terrifying idea that Michael isn’t even really aware of her as a person right now, that he’s gone somewhere nobody could hope to follow, his grief switching off the part of him that knows how to care for her or for anyone.
He tugs the bandana around his left hand off with his teeth. In another world, at any other time, Maria would have flinched at that, at the way now some of the blood that had seeped into the fabric is on Michael’s lips, his chin, Alex’s blood staining him everywhere even as his own nosebleed drips unheeded down his face to mingle with the gore below.
It’s hard to see with the lights shorted out, but Michael seriously doesn’t look well. Not just the nosebleed: his face is drenched in sweat, his eyes bloodshot and skin blanched a pallid grey. Even as he puts his hands back into position, one over his own heart, one over Alex’s, she has the distant, disbelieving thought that if her alien sort-of-boyfriend tries to bring her childhood best friend back from the dead right now, he might end up killing himself in the bargain. Maybe she should try and stop him. Maybe she should accept reality.
She says nothing, and Michael’s hand begins to glow.
It lasts for a long time. It is both the most beautiful and most terrible thing Maria has ever witnessed. The air whips up around them, Michael’s face leeches a horrible, bloodless white, his lips compressed into a thin line, eyes going glassy and unseeing. The blown out lights from the trailer start pulsing and humming like they’re going to turn on again even though that should be impossible, and Michael’s harsh breathing is coming in increasingly frequent gasps, like he’s trying to suck energy through the static in the air around him, trying to push it into Alex’s chest. The hand he’s got against his own chest is shaking; the hand against Alex’s is steady and firm.
It looks—there’s a moment, something Maria can’t describe even inside her own mind, where she sees something flickering between the two men. Something switching off in Michael for the tiniest second, something switching on in Alex’s body. Alex doesn’t move, but he… he’s not… it’s an immobile person on the ground suddenly, and not a corpse, and the two things are different. Michael makes a sound, a moan of pain, hand still glowing and wind whipping his hair around his face. He’s pushing himself, his powers, something in the very essence of who he is, straight into Alex, and Maria is afraid, very afraid, that she’s about to trade one dead body for another, and then—
And then it’s over.
Well, not over, god, the events of that night, the night Maria’s life kind of changes forever, have honestly just begun, but the part of her life where Alex Manes is dead right in front of her is over. It’s over. It’s done, and Michael is—and Alex is—
Alex gasps and sits up suddenly, nearly butting Michael in the head, eyes wild and arms flailing, his body lifted in a convulsive arc off the ground. Maria screams again. Her throat is going to be torn to shreds in the morning, from all the screaming, but it’s the only way she knows to let out even the smallest piece of the emotion filling her up to the brim, consuming her from the inside out.
“What—” he gasps out. “What—”
He looks wildly around him, sees Maria and reaches out a hand towards her, eyes wide and mouth gaping open. “What the fuck—”
Michael slumps over, and throws up, retching and weeping, and Maria can’t decide who she wants to care for first, she just reaches out to both of them, sobbing, her voice high and discordant as she slips and stumbles through the words. “Oh my god, oh my god, Alex, Alex.”
Alex studies her, confused, and then his attention is drawn by the sound of heaving breaths and he scrambles to his knees, shuffling away from Maria. “Michael?” he says, alarmed, reaching a hand out to where Guerin is on his hands and knees now, head bent over and gasping for air. “Shit, are you bleeding? Are you—”
“It’s your blood,” Michael moans through clattering teeth. “I’m not hurt, it’s your blood—” he retches again, but there’s nothing left for his stomach to expel.
“You were dead,” Maria says thoughtlessly, as if to name this fact will give it some ring of reality, will let her understand it as a fact of the universe. Alex snaps his head over to look at her, horror growing in his expression.
“What—”
“You were shot,” she explains, bits and pieces, patches of reality working their way back into her mind. “You were—and Michael did something—”
“Dead,” Michael repeats flatly, sitting up on his knees but swaying alarmingly like he might lose balance at any moment. “You were dead. Alex, you were dead, fuck, you were—”
He shudders and curls in on himself, coughing and moaning, shaking horribly, his body closing in on itself. Maria is afraid to touch him.
Alex, it seems, has no such compunctions. He shuffles forward awkwardly, swinging the leg with the prosthetic around so he can be on his knees in front of Michael, and he reaches for Michael, puts a hand on the side of his face to lift it up, the other one on his arm. “What the fuck did you do?”
“I have no goddamn idea,” Michael says, his chest still rising and falling too rapidly. “It’s Max’s power, but I—I just—I had to. You were—lying there—god—” he starts to fold in on himself again, but Alex throws himself forward and pulls him in so Michael’s head is crushed against Alex’s shoulder, and Michael lets it happen, slumping into the space of Alex’s body like he can’t hold himself up any longer. “You were dead,” Maria hears him repeat weakly, rubbing his face into Alex’s blood-soaked skin without hesitation. “Oh my god, thank god, fuck, Alex, are you okay?”
“You saved my life,” Alex says in astonishment, wrapping his arms tight around Michael. “Thank you, you just—”
Michael is trembling so hard Maria can see it even in the dim light. Her hand hurts and she realizes she’s squeezing her useless phone tight enough to cramp her fingers. It takes several seconds of concentrated effort to ease up the pressure, slip the phone back into her pocket. She’s gone very cold inside. She wishes this hadn’t happened, wishes she didn’t have to know what it felt like.
Michael lifts his head from Alex’s shoulder and his eyes dart over Alex’s face, mouth slightly open, searching for something. “You’re okay?”
“I’m a lot more worried about you right now,” Alex says, scolding. “Whatever you just did—”
“Worth it,” Michael says firmly, “worth it.”
Alex looks back over at Maria, shaking his head in bewilderment. “What happened to me, why do I feel—everything feels—”
Maria doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but she moves in closer, putting a hand on Alex’s shoulder, another on Michael’s, the three of them forming a triangle of connection. Three warm, alive bodies crouching here on the ground, blood surrounding them like a battlefield.
Alex blinks and looks back at Michael, then brings a hand up and touches Michael’s chest, pressing his palm flat against his heart. Michael says nothing, just keeps looking at him the way Maria is doing, marveling at the miracle of his healthy, breathing body. Alex lifts the hand slowly away from Michael’s chest, then brings it over to his own, fingers tracing something. Through the blood staining his skin, through the tattered remains of his shirt, there is a glowing multicolored handprint. The press of Michael’s miraculous touch, pulling him back to the land of the living.
Maria stares at Michael and Michael stares at the handprint, looks up into Alex’s eyes. In that moment, even with her hands still on each of their arms, Maria feels truly invisible, watching the two of them crouched together, eyes locked and breathing falling into perfect sync.
“I’m going to pass out,” Michael says, quite calmly. And then he does.
*****
Maria is the only one capable of driving them home. She feels uncomfortable behind the wheel in Michael’s truck, and wretched about leaving her own car out here in the middle of nowhere, but she figures she can always come back for it in the morning.
But Michael certainly can’t drive; he’s shaking and barely conscious, he keeps jerking awake on the hour-long drive back home and taking swigs out of a bottle of nail polish remover, which will never not be strange to see. And Alex certainly can’t drive, because he won’t let go of Michael.
“It’s the handprint,” he explains to her in a low, choked tone of voice, tugging Michael in close. The three of them are all seated on the bench in the truck, three grown adults barely fitting side by side, so that Alex’s thigh is pressed up against Maria’s, and Michael is slumped halfway in Alex’s lap. “I can feel him—his um—his emotions, he feels like shit, and he’s freaking out—”
“Can’t exactly blame him there,” Maria says tightly, keeping her eyes on the road. “Fuck.”
“I’m sorry,” Alex says.
“Are you apologizing for getting shot?” Maria asks with a hysterical laugh bubbling up behind the words. “Because Alex, I know you’ve got a martyr complex some of the time, but that’s—”
“No, for—for this,” he says, and shifts Michael so his head comes to rest on Alex’s shoulder. Maria looks over long enough to see Michael nuzzle his face under Alex’s chin, sighing, and then looks away. “He’s pretty out of it, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“Please,” Maria says. “I’m not thinking about any of that right now.”
And it’s true, for the record. All through the process of getting them back home, getting a stumbling, still weakened Michael into the Airstream, discarding their bloodstained clothes and taking turns in the tiny shower, rinsing away the blood and sweat, Maria is not thinking about their stupid, petty little love triangle at all.
She’s thinking about Alex dead on the ground, and the look on Michael’s face, the way he’d nearly leeched all the life out of his own body to give it to Alex, and how in that moment she’d wished she could have lent her own strength to his, wished she and Michael could have joined together for something good and life-giving, that their combined efforts could bring back a precious and worthy soul.
Getting Alex set up for his shower is a bit of a process, but since he says he’ll just be rinsing off the blood, he’s able to wedge himself standing on one leg in the cramped cubicle, and Maria leaves him to it, resisting the urge to follow him in and help him, coddle him like a child, make sure no harm ever comes to him again. Alex wouldn’t take kindly to that on a good day, and today is decidedly not a good day.
So, the sound of the running water a soundtrack to her whirling and disbelieving thoughts, Maria tries to comfort Michael instead. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, shirtless and still damp from his own shower. His head is in his hands, and his skin is nearly cool to the touch, such a contrast from his usual overheated body. He’d downed two entire bottles of acetone the second they’d walked in the door, even before he’d peeled himself out of his blood-soaked garments, and he seems much more composed now, shaken but clearly aware of where he is and what’s happening around him.
“Hey,” she says, sitting next to him, putting an arm around his waist. “Hey. You’re okay. We’re all okay.”
Michael stares blankly ahead of him, before blinking a few times and looking at Maria. “I lost a little bit of time there,” he says, a question in his voice, like he’s wondering if he owes her an apology or explanation for anything.
Maria nods, rubbing her hand in what she hopes is a soothing circle against his hip. “You made a miracle happen, Michael. You saved his life.”
Michael shakes his head, huffing out a disbelieving breath. “I had no idea what I was doing. No idea. But I couldn’t let—I couldn’t—I couldn’t—”
“I know,” Maria says.
“I love him,” Michael informs her, no hint of guilt or chagrin in his face, just a blank-faced declaration of fact.
“I know that too,” Maria says, the words catching in her throat. “It’s okay.”
“But with you, it’s…” Michael says, shaking his head like he’s trying to clear some impossible contradiction away. “I don’t know—it’s different. It’s too much with him. It’s like I can’t breathe, I can’t—he was s-so still, I—”
He swallows, squeezing his eyes shut like that will chase away the image that’s surely imprinted in his mind as firmly as it is in Maria’s. She’s usually so good at caring for people, for finding the thing they need to bring them through their pain, get them out of their head. But right now she feels utterly at a loss. She just wants them to be okay. She just wants to hold Michael and Alex both tight to her, until she finally believes they’re really together, and breathing, and safe.
“Would it be easier if you were alone for a while?” It’s the last thing she wants, but Michael still looks shell shocked. He’s not pulling away from Maria’s touch, but he’s not leaning into it either. “I could take Alex…” she trails off, hating the idea of leaving Michael right now. Hating the idea, she realizes, of separating the two men. There’s a wrongness to the very thought, and if the look on Michael’s face is anything to go by, he agrees.
“No,” he says gruffly. “No, stay.”
The sound of the water shuts off, and Alex shuffles out, holding a towel in front of him. Michael gets up abruptly, without ceremony, and approaches his naked ex-boyfriend, helping him to make his way over to the bed so he can sit to dry off and put on his prosthetic. Maria and Michael both crowd into the kitchen area, turning their backs to him while he dresses, the same way they’d done for Michael when he’d taken his own quick rinse.
“Michael,” Alex says when he’s finished dressing. His voice is soft and tentative, and Michael moves abruptly as if pulled by a string, taking several quick strides and dropping to the floor at Alex’s feet, hands resting on his knees. Maria follows, squeezes past them and takes a seat next to Alex on the bed. She’s acutely aware of Alex’s hand on his own chest, pressing as if to feel the ache of a bruise. She can see part of the mark sticking out past the edge of his shirt. “Michael, I can feel you.”
Michael nods up at him. “Yeah, I… I’m sorry, I don’t really know how it works.”
“No, it’s okay, it’s just—you feel awful. You feel—terrible.”
Michael doesn’t flinch at that, seems to understand what Alex means.
“You were dead at my feet,” Michael says gravely. “I’ve never felt anything so terrible in all my life.”
They’re staring at each other with such open, naked wanting that Maria feels briefly afraid, like if she were to vanish suddenly neither of them would even notice. But then Alex leans slightly into Maria, pressing their arms together like he needs the anchor of her there, and Michael tears his eyes away from Alex to look at her, blinking those long eyelashes over his watery, terrified eyes.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” Alex says, tapping his fingers over the mark, resting where the bullet had gone through. Right over his heart. Maria shudders. Such a perfect shot, an almost instantaneous kill, there’s no rational way he can be sitting here right now, unhurt and whole.
“Neither did I,” Michael says, his eyes wide with remembered horror. “I had no idea what I was doing. It might not have worked. You might have been—gone, I don’t—”
“Hey, I’m here, okay?” Alex speaks gently, bringing a hand down to brush the hair away from Michael’s face. He leaves his fingers there, trailing gently down the line of Michael’s cheek, his jaw. “I can feel that. You don’t need to be scared, I’m here, you fixed it—”
Michael shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, and he sounds like he might start crying at any moment. “I’m so sorry. I’m absolutely panicking right now. I don’t mean to put you through that.”
Maria is desperately curious, almost a little jealous, that Alex has such a direct insight into Michael’s emotional state. Not that Michael is the kind of guy who hides his feelings, exactly, it’s just… an intimacy she’s watching them share right in front of her eyes, and she feels outside of it.
Alex laughs. “I think I can suffer through the side effects. I’m breathing thanks to you.”
Michael squeezes his eyes shut. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe that happened.”
“What do you feel?” Maria asks, and both men turn to look at her, as if inviting her into a bubble they’d been occupying alone. “Michael, I mean, can you feel Alex too?”
Michael bites his lip, concentrates. “Hard to tell. I’m feeling a lot of things right now. Overwhelmingly so. I think Max says it’s more of a one-way thing, but then again Max has a lot more experience with this than I do…”
Maria considers asking if they should call him, ask him to come, check Michael and Alex over to make sure weird alien side effects aren’t going to rear up and harm them further. But there’s a feeling of connection here in the Airstream, a closeness like they’ve found their own secret hideaway where nobody else can come. She craves that feeling, that strange closeness, that knowing that the three of them have all spent the night on this tiny shelf of a bed before, albeit not all at the same time.
“Right now you’re running on adrenaline,” Alex says, and Maria can tell he’s trying to sound composed, keep Michael calm. Michael’s hands are still resting on Alex’s knees, and Alex still has a hand pressed against the edge of Michael’s face and neck, almost like he’s forgotten he’s touching him. “You’re about as scared as you’ve ever been in your life because you almost lost us. You care about both of us, and we might have been killed, if you hadn’t been there. You could have lost us.”
“I did lose you,” Michael says hoarsely, staring up into Alex’s eyes. “I just brought you back.”
“We’re all here,” Maria says, pointlessly but firmly. She has the idea that if she keeps saying it, it will keep being true, will start feeling true. “We all got out of there alive.”
“Thought I was going to kill myself,” Michael says blankly, blinking his eyes between Maria and Alex. The words come out sharp and fast, like a confession he doesn’t want to make. “Had my hand on your chest, and I could feel it, the power, just—I knew I had to keep going even if I stopped my own heart to restart yours. Couldn’t pull away. Didn’t want to. I hoped it would kill me if it didn’t work.”
“Don’t say that,” Alex says, all his gathered calm gone in an instant, his voice scraping out on every word. “How dare you say that to me—” and he leans forward and kisses Michael right on the mouth, hard.
Michael makes a wounded sound against his lips and pushes up into it, mouth opening and eyes fluttering closed, even as Alex is pulling back, shaking his head. There are tears tracing their way down his face from both eyes. “Didn’t mean to do that,” he gasps, rubbing a hand across the mark across his chest. “Fuck.” He turns away from Michael’s flushed face and teary eyes and looks at Maria. “God, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry Maria, I—”
“It’s okay,” Maria says, and realizes it’s true in saying it. “I understand.”
“This is just—this is a lot,” Alex says, voice cracking, tears still cascading down his cheeks.
“You can feel how much he loves you,” Maria guesses, and Alex is nodding in agreement before he can fully process the words, and then he blinks, startled, looking between Maria and Michael like he’s worried he’s just admitted something he shouldn’t have.
“I mean—I don’t—”
“It’s not news to me,” Maria tells him gently. “Or to you, I shouldn’t think.”
Michael swallows audibly, and his head tilts forward, resting against Alex’s leg, burying his face in the fabric of a pair of his own borrowed sweatpants. “I can’t control that,” he says weakly, face hidden from Maria. “I can’t help that, ‘s been over ten years. If I could stop it, I would have done it by now.”
Alex takes a shuddering, noisy breath and he tangles a hand in Michael’s hair, tugging gently like he wants an anchor. Michael grinds his face into Alex’s thigh in response. “Yeah,” Michael continues, like he’s answering a question. “Yeah, fuck, I think I can feel you too. You absolute bastard.”
“What?” Maria says, startled. When she looks at Alex’s face, he just looks very, very tired.
Michael turns his face so he can look up at Maria, while his head is still on Alex’s leg. “He loves me,” he tells her, and he sounds so defeated, it breaks her heart.
“You knew that,” Alex says.
“You love me a lot,” Michael continues, talking to Alex now. “It hurts.”
“Well yeah,” Alex says, annoyed. “Yeah.”
Maria laughs. They both look at her, squinting like they’re worried she’s lost her mind. Hell, maybe she has. “You two are so—” she shakes her head, at a loss, and then moves in close to Alex, putting a hand on the back of his neck and pinning his eyes on hers. She moves slowly to telegraph her movement, but Alex doesn’t back away as she comes closer, pressing their lips together. She imagines she can taste the remnants of Michael on Alex’s lips, salty tears and bitter acetone.
She pulls away and then leans down and kisses Michael too, and he lets her, lets her control the touch, deepen it and then pull back, sliding their noses together.
And then they all stay there in a hushed silence, crowded together, Michael looking up at Maria, Maria leaning against Alex, resting in some collapsed puddle of limbs and exhaustion.
“I should—go,” Alex says quietly, the first to break the silence. “You’re right, it hurts. It’s too much, right now.”
Michael looks away from Maria and up at Alex, eyes narrowed. “Like hell you’re going anywhere.”
“Guerin—”
“You were dead two hours ago Alex, you’ve lost it if you think I’m letting you out of my sight.”
“I’m completely fine. I’m in better physical condition than you are right now, thanks to whatever the hell risky alien power bullshit you decided to pull without thinking it through—”
“Fuck off if you think I’d have chosen anything else.”
“Fuck off if you think I’m okay with losing you to some self-sacrificial—”
“That’s rich, coming from you—”
“Stop,” Maria says. “It’s a feedback loop, you’re working each other up.” They both look at her, and she gets that feeling again, like they’d forgotten she was there. It’s not a good feeling, but it’s also not as wretched as she would have expected it to be. It’s almost flattering, how much she can sense these two men’s trust in her, that they’d flay themselves open and bear their souls to one another right in front of her. It’s the bearing of witness to something sacred, whether it has anything to do with her or not.
“Well, Alex isn’t going anywhere,” Michael says emphatically.
“Agreed,” Maria says at once, and Michael smiles at her then turns a smug grin in Alex’s direction, as if that settles it.
“I’m the one who gets to make that decision,” Alex says, but it’s a token protest and they all know it.
Michael scoffs at him. “I’m the one who just shoved your fucking soul back into your body with the power of sheer desperation, so I think I should get a say in how you take care of yourself from here. You’ve always been damn rotten at it.”
“God, you’re so mad at me,” Alex says, shaking his head and smiling. “I can feel that, it’s so weird.”
Michael looks at the visible part of the mark in open curiosity, something close to satisfaction settling over his face. “I wasn’t mad,” he says. “I wasn’t mad at you until you got yourself killed. And now I’m mad because you keep leaving me. You keep trying to leave me and it pisses me off. We’re done with that, Alex. I mean it.”
Alex’s nostrils flare. “I’ve been standing still for a while now, Guerin. Not my fault you’ve failed to notice.”
The energy in the room has shifted, something molten crawling up Maria’s spine. She senses that she has more power in this moment than either Alex or Michael realize, that as the intermediary, the only one not being influenced by an interwoven web of incredibly powerful and painful emotions caused by alien healing powers, she could diffuse things, peel the tension away and send them all off into a peaceful slumber right now.
She could do that, she thinks. It would probably be the smart thing to do, the safest. She doesn’t want to. Her skin is buzzing. She’s high off the sheer adrenaline of the last couple of hours, the frustrating desire to help, the inability to figure out how. But maybe this is a way. Maybe this is a gift she knows how to give to them all.
“Nobody’s going anywhere right now, regardless,” Maria says, and she pulls on Michael’s arm, guides him until he’s climbing onto the bed to sit between them. “Nobody’s going anywhere.”
When she kisses Michael this time, she pours all of herself into it. She focuses on how it feels when Michael looks at her with that shining, nearly awestruck affection on his face, the way he’s so clearly impressed and drawn to her, the way it makes her feel to be wanted by him. And the way she’d needed him, leaned on him, while she’d worried about her mother. That was why she’d been so angry; she’d let herself have this window of time where accepting softness and consideration and care from Michael Guerin had felt natural and safe, and she’d felt a fool when she’d realized how little of him she’d been permitted to know.
But that’s over, and as Michael hums happily against her mouth, the vibration cascading in waves down her limbs, she lets the last of that anger and hurt sweep away. In the face of what they’ve suffered and overcome together on this night, what does the rest of it matter?
When she pulls away from the kiss, she and Michael make eye contact, studying each other for signals. Maria can see it on his face, his wanting, his fear. He’s more centered in himself now, the acetone and the shower and the conversation setting his pulse back to some kind of baseline. Still, with the handprint, the emotion sharing, the fact that none of them have talked about this… it might be a bad idea. It might be unhealthy and irresponsible. Michael’s breath is hot against her face; she can see his individual eyelashes quivering as his eyelids flutter.
“Kiss him,” she tells Michael, and he turns away from her like he was waiting for her to say that.
Alex makes a noise, not of surprise but more of surrender, when Michael kisses him, turning his body so he can pull Alex firmly into his arms. Lips opening and a low moaning sound of joy filling the air of the tiny space, breaking open something in all of them. Maria waits to feel jealous or miserable or uneasy, but instead she just feels relieved. Watching the two of them touch each other is like watching two magnets that have been struggling to stay apart, finally surrender to the inevitability of their life’s purpose.
Alex is grasping Michael’s bare shoulders, back, in his hands like he’s worried he’s going to stop touching him, but Michael looks like he’ll never stop touching him again, hands wrapped firm around Alex’s waist, pulling him in close, pressing him forward until Alex falls back with an oof onto the bed, and Michael leans over him, their lips still connected. Maria finds herself shifting back to give them room, sliding further up onto the bed so she’s trapped between the wall and their bodies, but it feels safe there, like she’s caged in by all the love she can sense emanating from their movements.
She watches them, not as an impartial spectator, but more out of anticipation, learning the shape of them, cataloguing new angles of information about Michael, learning things she’d never thought to know about Alex at all.
When Michael’s kissing Alex, he kind of loses it for a while, pressing into him deep and wild and endless, hands gripping hard and tongue sliding into Alex’s waiting mouth. It’s inelegant, the keyed-up movements of someone who’s been on edge and desperate for too long. And Alex lets him for a little while, writhing up into him in similar frantic intensity. But then he soothes him. Maria sees it happening, the gentling of Alex’s hands, one of them petting slowly through Michael’s curls, the other pressed against his back like an anchor, and Michael’s kisses go from quick, biting, to slow and languorous, endless and loving.
“Hey,” Alex breathes in the space between their lips when Michael pulls away for air. “Maria, come here.”
She’s a bit startled to be given instruction like that; she’d had this idea that since this was happening at her initiation she’d have to be the one to steer, to guide, to insinuate herself into the equation in the first place, but the minute Alex says it she knows she wants to listen. She lays herself out flat beside Alex, and Alex nudges his nose against Michael’s chin, turning Michael’s face away from his own and over to Maria’s.
“Kiss her,” he instructs softly, and Maria lets out a breath. It’s like they’re passing Michael between them, like he’s there for their pleasure and they get to decide how to use him, and if the blown-own pupils in Michael’s eyes are any indication, he’s finding it as weirdly fucking thrilling as she suddenly is.
It’s good for a while, Michael laying half on top of Alex to reach her with Alex being between them, kissing her wet and deep, and when Michael reaches to pull her shirt off she doesn’t stop him, shimmies out of the clothing and sighs as his hands start to skim across her bare arms, her collarbone, stomach. There really isn't a lot of room to be graceful, so for a while, they all shift and awkwardly elbow each other and laugh and apologize as clothing comes off, pausing to kiss one another, Michael’s lips against the shell of her ear, Alex nipping at the column of Michael’s throat.
When Michael moves to help Alex slip off the sweats, Maria notices a small shift in the energy of the room, reads it in the twitch of Alex’s eye, a quick glance at Maria and then away. She pieces together what the problem is just before Alex sits up and pushes Michael’s hands away, moving his own hands to his prosthetic.
Maria has never seen him without it. She wonders if Alex doesn’t want to let her.
Alex looks at Michael, who has frozen with his hands in the air, hovering over Alex’s leg, like he’s waiting for something. He must find it in Alex’s eyes, because he tosses the discarded sweats away behind him somewhere and moves his hands forward to the clasps.
“Let me?” Michael says, just to be sure, as he slides down on his knees again in front of Alex. Alex nods, hand rubbing absently at his bare chest, and Maria suddenly wonders…
“You can feel him? How much can you tell? What is it…”
“He trusts me,” Michael says softly, even though Maria hadn’t been talking to him. “I can feel that. He likes it when I take care of him, even though he’d never say it.”
“Asshole,” Alex says fondly. And then he turns to Maria and raises his eyebrows like he’s waiting for her to say something. She notices him assessing her in curiosity, and her skin heats up at Alex’s eyes on her naked flesh. It’s odd to be looked at that way, with something akin to appreciation but no active lust.
“And Michael?” Maria asks obligingly. This is fun, she realizes with some surprise. Helping them to mess with each other. “How does he feel right now?”
“He’s hard,” Alex says with a gruff, wry humor in the words. “Having trouble figuring out what he wants most right now. He wants my hand on him. He thinks you smell good.”
Maria laughs, charmed and a little turned on to hear it coming out of Alex’s mouth. “Yeah?”
“He likes your stomach,” Alex continues, and Michael makes a choked sound of irritation, glaring up at Alex even as he takes the prosthetic off with gentle hands. Practiced hands, Maria notes. He’s done this before. “Yeah, he likes when you let him kiss your stomach, pin his face down and pull his hair a little before you let him move lower—”
“Are you reading my mind right now?” Michael groans, pressing a casual kiss to Alex’s knee, above the spot of the amputation, before climbing back onto the bed between them.
“Maybe a little,” Alex says. “Or maybe I’m just pulling from memory. Am I wrong?”
“No,” Michael tells him cheekily, and then he lunges for Maria, pinning her squealing to the bed and burying his face in her stomach, kissing her navel, moving higher, just under her breasts.
Alex laughs, and it’s such a joyous sound, so alive and happy and uncomplicated, that Maria reaches a hand out without thinking, wanting him to touch her. Alex does, taking her hand and tangling their fingers together even as Michael squirms up the bed and pulls one of Maria’s nipples into his mouth.
Things go hazy, perfect, strange and wonderful, for a long time. Michael uses his mouth on her, kisses his way all the way down her body and then licks her until she’s gasping and swearing and squirming up into the pressure of it. And Alex watches, running his hands occasionally up and down Maria’s arms like he’s curious about the softness of her skin. She feels his touch as some impossible, cascading, enhancement of sensation, vibrating through her everywhere. “He really likes doing this,” Alex tells her a little breathlessly. “Fuck. He really—really likes this.”
Maria comes with a wail, and Michael groans against her, licks her through it. Not long afterwards he’s kissing Alex again, and the thought of Alex being able to taste her on Michael’s lips makes her want to come again; she wants something inside her, but she knows Michael won’t fuck her tonight, that that’s something they’ll next do when they’re on their own. It’s this sense she has of the energy of the room, that she is wholly a part of this but also a facilitator so Michael and Alex can get what they need from one another.
So she sits up, naked and sated, and she watches as Alex and Michael lie side by side and bring each other off with only their hands, gasping into each other’s mouths, and Maria leans forward to kiss them while they move, nudging her face in between theirs and making sure to touch them both. A paradoxically gentle caress that both Michael and Alex lean up and into when it’s offered.
Alex and Michael come at the same time, which seems to catch them both off guard in the best way, Michael groaning and burying his face in Alex’s neck, Alex’s free hand flailing out wildly and landing clumsily against Maria’s elbow. He clamps down with his fingers against her arm like he needs to hold onto her so he won’t float away, and when they both get ahold of themselves enough to move, Michael laughs and laughs right into the skin of Alex’s neck, and Alex turns to kiss Maria again like he wants to make sure to include her, pull her into the center of whatever this has turned out to be.
“Could you feel that?” Maria asks, eyes wide. “Each other, I mean?” She’s staring at the print on Alex’s bare chest, the vibrant glow of it, so stark. It doesn’t read to her like a brand, like a mark of Michael’s ownership, but instead like something that proves a truth Michael and Alex both already would have known.
“Let’s just say ordinarily I probably could have gone longer,” Alex says roughly, still breathing a little faster than normal, sweat shining bright on his face. “Wouldn’t want you to spread rumors about my ability to last.”
“I’ll keep the gossip to a bare minimum,” she assures him.
“Really. Intense,” Michael says bluntly, blinking up at Maria like he’s just been hit in the head with a frying pan. Maria can’t stop smiling. It’s great. Somehow, everything’s great. “Fucking hell, DeLuca.”
After that, they go to bed. Michael fetches water to drink, washcloths, cleans them all off and then pulls blankets around them. It’s adorable, it’s domestic, Michael is one of the most solicitous and respectful sexual partners she’s ever had, especially after he’s had an orgasm, openly eager to do right by his people, to tuck them in and make them comfortable. The bed’s not big enough for the three of them, it’s really not, but Maria doesn’t care. She just curls herself around Alex as Michael does the same, and they all stay silent to listen to the sound of each other’s breathing until they fall asleep.
*****
In the morning, Michael kisses her good morning while she can still feel the press of Alex’s arm trapped somewhat uncomfortably under her back. Michael leans over the body between them, not as if Alex isn’t there, but as if it’s of no real consequence that he is.
“You okay?” he asks her in a whisper.
She is. She really is. “Feel like I could sleep for a week, but yes. Are you?”
Michael nods, brushes their noses together, kisses her again.
“Michael,” Alex croaks, blinking awake and looking up from between the two of them
“Hey,” Michael says, a broken open, tender ache in his voice. It’s a different flavor of affection from the way he’d just spoken to Maria, but she can’t really tell which one he means more, which one matters more. Maybe it’s never been a competition. “Hey, how do you feel?”
Alex blinks up at him, one eye still closed, and twists his mouth like he’s considering. Then he looks at Maria and smirks. “Wiped. Aching all over and like my remaining leg might fall off if I try to stand? Kind of like I got to feel two orgasms at the same time last night. Fucking wild, you should find out if you can bottle this, you’d make a fortune.”
It’s so Alex, to break the tension in that way, to put them all at ease. Michael laughs easily, ducking down to butt his forehead familiarly against Alex, and then he kisses him, a quick thing, perfunctory, like it’s part of a routine.
For a shining flash of a moment, Maria wonders if she’s unlocked the solution, if this is what they’re supposed to be to each other. The three of them. Could she do it? Is it who she is, what she wants?
It’s a little awkward after that, but a pleasant sort of awkward, all of them shuffling around in the small space, pulling on discarded clothing. Michael makes coffee, Maria gathers up the sheets and towels from last night and puts them in a pile on the end of the bed. Alex attaches his leg, and can’t stop tracing Michael’s mark on his chest with his fingers, an abstracted look on his face.
“I should get going,” Alex says finally, setting down his finished cup of coffee.
Michael approaches him with a skittish uncertainty as he stands near the door, and Maria watches them from her perch on the newly stripped bed, cradling her own cup in both hands.
“You sure?” Michael says. “Because nobody’s asking you to leave.”
Alex nods. “I’d be able to tell if I wasn’t welcome. I mean, I’d literally be able to tell.”
Michael nods and bites his lip, looking down shyly. “I’ve never wanted you to go. You know that.”
“Thank you,” Alex says simply, and Michael seems to know why he’s being thanked, even if Maria can’t quite tell. Based on last night, she thinks they’re getting quite a bit of each other’s feelings, even specific thoughts filtering through. It must be intensely, uncomfortably intimate, to know someone so well. Or maybe they’d never needed the handprint for that. “I felt… last night, and now, I feel…”
“Loved?” Michael offers.
“Yeah.” Alex puts a hand up and over the spot on his chest where Michael’s handprint rests safely hidden beneath a borrowed t-shirt. “I still feel—”
“Always,” Michael says, and he steps closer, takes Alex’s hand off his chest and presses it to his own, covering it with his fingers. “Always, Alex. Tell me you know that.”
Alex looks over Michael’s shoulder with uncertain eyes towards the bed, and Maria meets his gaze evenly, no fear or embarrassment.
“It’s okay,” she mouths to him.
“I—” Alex tears his eyes away and back to Michael. “Me too.”
She watches as they step forward into a hug, Alex gripping the back of Michael’s hair hard in his hands, Michael’s arms tight against Alex’s back.
“Last night was—I could never regret that,” Alex says solemnly when he pulls back, and he’s looking at Maria when he says it. “But as long as this is still…” he rubs his hand over his chest, closing his eyes like he wants to focus harder on the way it feels.
“I know,” Michael says. “I know, I understand. Do you want me to take you home?”
Alex quirks a small smile at the offer, presses a kiss to Michael’s cheek, right near his mouth. “I’m okay. I think the walk will do me good. Besides, you’ll know if I need you, right?” He backs away and taps a finger over his chest.
Michael smiles suddenly, pleased. “Yeah, I will.”
*****
Once Alex is gone, Maria gets a little scared. The bubble burst, the possible ramifications of what’s just happened are swirling around in her head faster than she can properly focus on them.
“You could have gone with him,” Maria says when Michael comes to sit beside her in the bed, sighing and relaxing back against the wall. “I would have understood.”
“He told me no,” Michael says simply. But then he smiles as if to soften a blow. “And he’s right—going with him now wouldn’t have made anything better.”
“Are you okay?” Maria asks, concerned. “Look, I’m not one for self-sabotage, but I’m sitting here thinking that dating a man who’s madly in love with my best friend might not be the best idea I’ve ever had.”
Michael doesn’t even flinch, or try to deny it, he just shrugs and shakes his head. “When I’m with him it’s like I’m breaking into pieces,” he says. “It’s too much, it’s—overwhelming, like I’m going to forget who I am except in relation to him. I don’t know how to make that work right now. It hurts too much, and I don’t want to hurt anymore.”
“Michael…”
“And it’s so entirely unfair to you, that I’ve put you in the middle of this.”
“You could—maybe we could talk about—the three of us—”
She’s not sure how it would even work, in practice. She’s never thought of herself as someone who could have that kind of relationship, but this whole night has made her realize that she cares about Michael Guerin enough to want to fight for him, and it’s also made her realize that Michael’s heart is always going to belong to Alex. How can she…
“I can’t,” Michael says with a pained laugh. “It means so much that you’d be willing to even have that conversation, and I love him, god, I do love him, but I can’t. Loving him wasn’t something I chose, it’s something that happened to me and I can never go back to before it was true, but that doesn’t mean—Maria, I can’t be with someone who makes me feel like I’m drowning all the time.”
“So what am I, then?” Maria asks, genuinely curious. “A lifeboat?”
“No,” he says at once, firm, and leans in to kiss her. She lets him, and it feels good. “No. You have nothing to do with me and Alex.” When she raises an eyebrow at him, he laughs, amending his statement. “Okay, except in all the ways that you obviously do.”
“Is it too messy? If Alex is painful, maybe I’m too close to it, maybe I’m a part of the pain—”
“There’s got to be more than one way to love someone,” Michael says, and the words have a ring of pleading to them, like he’s been thinking about it a lot and he wants someone to back him up. “It has to be possible to choose something different for myself, something outside of all the suffering. I don’t know another way to survive.”
“I can’t be a consolation prize.”
“You’re not,” Michael says, and the thing is, Maria believes he means it. So much of this conversation is a study in contradictions, but maybe that’s how life is sometimes. Maybe it really is that much of a fucking mess, and Maria just has to decide if she wants to stay in the center of it, or else opt out for fear it’ll be too much.
“I can’t do that again,” Maria says finally, laying down a condition at Michael’s feet. “Last night meant a lot to me, but I can’t again. I can’t watch you two together, I can’t see that and hold on to the idea that you and I might have a real chance. So if we—then you can’t, with Alex.”
“Or with anyone else,” Michael says, matching her instantly. “I don’t want to, Maria. I don’t want that. I’m sitting here telling you I want you. And even if I’d driven Alex home, even if I’d gone with him, I would have come back here without him.”
“Yeah?”
“I made my choice a while ago. And last night the person I’ve loved more than anything since I was a fucked up homeless teenager got murdered right in front of my eyes and I lost my mind a little bit. I think we all did. And I’m not sorry for it, but that doesn’t mean I’ve changed my mind, either.”
Maria doesn’t say anything. She can’t say anything for a moment, her body sending her back to that sensation of pure terror and grief, Alex staring unseeing up into the stars. She can hear the way Michael had sounded, how he’d yelled. Don’t touch him. Because in that moment Michael hadn’t been someone who cared about her, he had only been the person who loved Alex enough to die for him.
“If you want out, I wouldn’t blame you,” Michael says, soft and a little defeated.
“I want to stay,” Maria says without having to think about it. “I want in, Michael. I mean it.”
He looks so grateful it almost breaks her heart. It’s like he can’t see what she now knows to be true, that it doesn’t matter that he belongs to Alex, because some part of her has already started to belong to him, and she’ll take what she can get.
Maria DeLuca takes pride in her honesty, but the secret is, she’s always been good at lying to herself.
There are the love stories that seem to be fated by the gods, and there are the softer, gentler stories. The stories of a woman who owns a bar, and the good-natured, fucked up trauma case of a local drinker, who looks at her with stars in his eyes and shows up to fix things because he wants to be useful, because he needs to be needed. There are stories of girls who are bad at being cared for, and boys who care anyway. And when Michael kisses her she doesn’t think about Alex. She thinks about letting herself be held by a man who might just be worth it, for once.
The thing is, she believes that Michael could love her. And she’s already started to love him, in a way that’s pointless to deny. She’s not keeping Michael and Alex apart from each other, she knows that very well. The list of things keeping those two from figuring their shit out is long, and twisted, and might take a lifetime to untangle. Is she really so much of a monster, to want to be with Michael at least in the meantime?
Not all love stories are meant to last forever. And maybe Michael needs her right now. Maybe she needs him too. She doesn’t want them to end just yet, not when they’ve just had the chance to begin.