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For thenewnormal, post 1x13 - Spoilers
By the time Kyle took a moment to truly breathe and thing about what's happened, he is back at the hospital. Hours earlier he had been shot. Yeah, he's standing there, mostly fine, but he had been shot. His shooter is lying in a bed in a coma, Dr Valenti listed as his physician to be contacted immediately about any changes to his condition, and for now, it's over.
Except it isn't. Not at all. And everything is still madness around them, and Liz and Max and all of them are dealing with so much, he realizes that he has to make a call. One that maybe he should have made sooner, as soon as he realized that he was maybe being followed, but if he does nothing else before maybe deciding to drink himself into a matching coma, Alex needs to know about his dad.
Ignoring how cold his hands feel as he hits the buttons to dial Alex, ignoring how the entire world feels kind of distant from him, from what he's going through, moving down the hall from Jesse's room to try and get some privacy as he puts the phone to his ear, praying Alex is okay and that he will answer the phone. That he even can.
Except it isn't. Not at all. And everything is still madness around them, and Liz and Max and all of them are dealing with so much, he realizes that he has to make a call. One that maybe he should have made sooner, as soon as he realized that he was maybe being followed, but if he does nothing else before maybe deciding to drink himself into a matching coma, Alex needs to know about his dad.
Ignoring how cold his hands feel as he hits the buttons to dial Alex, ignoring how the entire world feels kind of distant from him, from what he's going through, moving down the hall from Jesse's room to try and get some privacy as he puts the phone to his ear, praying Alex is okay and that he will answer the phone. That he even can.
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A part of him very much wanted to hurt his father more than he had the day Alex had broke in here. He’d killed Jim Valenti. Maybe his hadn’t been the hands who’d given the former Sheriff the tumor, but could you really blame the person who’d done it? He’d spent decades in captivity having god knew what happen to them and how was he supposed to know that Valenti was one of the good guys? And now his father had tried to kill Kyle.
“If he’s working for Dad, it’s possible that Flint will still be out there.” He wanted to believe that his brother wasn’t completely irredeemable. He’d warned them to get out, after all. Not that it hadn’t been obvious pretty quickly, but he could have done so much worse. His dad, well, his dad would have left at least two of them in there and he wasn’t so sure he was safe anymore. “And who knows how many more of my brothers.”
He let Kyle go once he was satisfied that he probably didn’t have anything major wrong with him. He wasn’t screaming in pain, although he’d have a nice bruise for his trouble. Instead, he leaned back against the table and tried to take all of this in. He wanted to help. He needed to help because he was apparently as much in this as anyone. Maybe he was veering from the path his father had set out from him, but he was still cleaning up his father’s messes. Still felt responsible for helping to stop him. And it’d been his father who’d cleaned up after every murder Noah had committed without doing the due diligence to figure out who was responsible. The one person he might have been justified to keep a prisoner and he hid the evidence that might have helped catch him.
And Michael. God, he didn’t want to think about the blood he’d seen on Michael. He’d said it wasn’t his. Had it been Liz? Had he been trying to help her before running off in the same kind of frenzy he’d run from Alex?
So his answer to Kyle was yes. Yes, he did want to go track Michael down and make sure he was okay. But he already had a friend to worry about first and he could only deal with one thing at a time.
He shifted again and leaned forward enough to put a hand on Kyle’s shoulder.
“How are you doing with all of this? It’s been a pretty crazy 24 hours.” This time yesterday, they’d been planning on going out to look at some anomalous heat signatures, never knowing that what they found would change everything.
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Saying it like that, making himself think about the fact that so much of his life has gone entirely upside down in a day and he's not sure how to handle it, except to keep pushing through and do what has to be done.
"Guess it's a good thing my only full time patient right now is in a coma," he says, realizing as he felt his hand against Alex's that maybe he isn't handling things as well as he things. Showing it by holding his hand out, noticing the tremor through his hand that belied more than his words or tone did.
Folding his hand back into a fist, dropping it to his lap as if that hides it all.
"I should be asking you that," he says, deflecting as best he can as he sits up in his seat more, fixing Alex with a serious look, arching a brow. "If you need to go look for anyone, try and find them, I understand that. Okay? It was good of you to come hear this face to face," he says, trying to pull together a semblance of the man he had been a couple of weeks before. Hell, even forty-eight hours before. Before Liz had told him about aliens, and before he'd had to cope with a patient that drank acetone for pain, and had killed a friend of theirs and yet hadn't been responsible.
Forty-eight hours ago when he hadn't known about aliens kept as test rats, killed because of their attempts to rescue them, or had witnessed the video of his father's murder. When he hadn't sewn up his ex-girlfriend who he'd just been trying to rebond with as friends. When he hadn't been shot, an intended murder victim. When life had been normal. Except, he knows, this is his normal now. There is now going back.
He shifts though without thinking towards Alex, towards that touch. Much as they had fought in high school, when Kyle had been a miserable asshole to Alex, there had been a time when they had been close, when if he'd been asked to name his best friend, he would have said Alex Manes, and part of him has never forgotten that.
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“You told me my father was in a coma under your care,” Alex reminded him. “When yesterday we blew up one of his research facilities.” Not intentionally, never intentionally when there’d been that many people there. But they’d blown it up nonetheless. “There was no way I wasn’t coming to find out what happened.”
He took a breath. “I should. If only because there was blood on Michael’s shirt the last time I saw him.” He took one of Kyle’s hands in his. “But I don’t think you should be driving anywhere.” His hands were still shaky and that was no wonder. Kyle hadn’t been through any of the training or situations that Alex had. It wasn’t any wonder he wasn’t reacting well to any of this. He was having to learn very literally on the battlefield. He squeezed Kyle’s hand and let go.
“Why don’t you come with me? You can give Liz a call on the way and find out if she needs any more advanced care than she got when you were playing field medic.” And meanwhile, Alex would have to start contemplating whether they were going to need actual medical supplies on hand if no one was actually going to get proper medical care. His basement was only stocked for someone going through recovery and everything in it was years out of date.
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"I should have... I couldn't think of a better way to say it,' he admits. "Eventually they'll contact the rest of the family, and I needed you to know what happened." He sighs, rubbing at his temple, realizing he couldn't remember the last time he had eaten, the last thing he'd had to drink. It felt like a year since he'd pulled up at the junkyard to meet up with Alex and Guerin.
He shifts, looking away again. "I keep thinking about all of those people," he says. Not aliens. Not different. People. They had been people. "And how we got them..." He shakes his head, knowing if he goes down this road he'll never stop, the facade will crack and he isn't sure he'll be able to stop from breaking if he let's the cracks start to grow.
His hand still shakes against Alex's but he's thankful for that secure anchor in that moment, his fingers curling against Alex's. "If... if this is my life now, I really need to think about redoing my guest room," he murmurs, almost tracking the same place Alex's thoughts are when he mentions calling Liz. "I get in trouble with admin sometimes because we get these patients in the emergency room, right?" He looks at Alex, almost smiling as he talks about this. "And they'll start to get cagey about insurance and all, so I go out and talk to them. Usually it's sick kids and I can't... I just can't think about what would happen if their parents got picked up, if these kids got sent to those camps," he says, expression hardening. "We have a sample closet and I'm forever raiding it for them, before they're registered and expecting to have insurance. My mom would have my ass if she knew," he says, smiling then though it's watery as his is gaze.
"I'd... I'd like to tag along,' he says, his hand still holding Alex's, more or less. "I need to get her on antibiotics if nothing else. So yeah, that's good. I need..." He looks around. "Maybe I shouldn't just stay here, entirely not watching that video of my dad."
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So close to those kind of thoughts, the smile he shot Kyle when he was talking about samples and lack of insurance was feeble, but it was there. “You’re a good guy, Kyle. After you got over your asshole phase.” And most of the time that dickishness had been pointed towards him. He might not have had much of a backbone back then, but he’d used most of it to stand up to Kyle.
“Yeah, no brooding over that. Especially when you have my dad in the hospital. But you know, if you give me ten minutes with one of the computers, I can make sure that I’m listed as having power of attorney. It won’t last forever, but it might hold off my brothers for a little while. Enough for us to regroup and figure out what else he might have in place.”
He squeezed Kyle’s hand before letting go. “Come on. Let’s go try to figure out what’s going on.”
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"Yeah well, a lot changed after graduation." He'd left Roswell. He'd left behind the guys that had encouraged him at his worse. He'd left behind Alex, and those thoughts he had buried deep in his psyche so many years before. "I want to be this guy," he says, meaning it. In everything, and especially with Alex. Alex who was off limits and in love and so whatever all of that had been, it didn't matter.
"Do what you need to," he says with a nod. "Thankfully I'm the one they would consult on about his sudden coma without a cause, so I can push things back with a series of useless tests so no one will check his levels but me," he notes. "I just... I don't think I can keep him like that forever but we have time."
He nods as he says it, realizing his hand feels cold then, almost tingling and he forces himself to shake it off as he stands. "Let's go."
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“I’m going to try Max and Isobel’s first,” he told Kyle. “Tell Liz that I think she’s an idiot for not going in to get proper care, but that I love her anyway and I’m glad she’s safe.”
He put the car into gear and headed toward Max’s. If they didn’t find Michael by the time they got around to the Wild Pony, Alex would at least ask Maria for a drink and the intervening distance would give him an excuse for why he’d decided to start day drinking. He hadn’t had to use an excuse to explain away any behavior yet, but if things kept going like they were, he was going to have to start and it was always a difficult proposition, lying to Maria.
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Settling in, Kyle got out his phone and started texting with Liz. "She's says she's not an idiot," he says between texts. "And that she loves you too." He pauses, texting more, considering the area around them while waiting. "Huh. She hasn't heard from Max since early this morning, like before dawn, and is heading out to look for him herself. She says she thinks Noah's dead though," he says, glancing at Alex. "Because she says she can't feel him anymore, and the handprint he left on her is gone."
He falls silent, considering that, not liking any of it. "She'd know if Max was gone, wouldn't she?"
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“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how it works.”
He took another breath and his grip on the wheel relaxed. “Let her know that we’re checking Max’s and Isobel’s. We’ll keep a lookout for Max if she keeps one for Michael.”
He considered that maybe what they needed to do was all sit down together and talk. They’d learned a lot when it had just been him, Kyle, and Cameron.
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"Got it," he murmurs softly, texting Liz... and then also sending out a couple of other texts as well. One to his mother, asking if she had picked up Guerin or seen Max that morning. Another was sent to a nurse he knows, checking with her about anyone brought in overnight fitting the description of any of those they were looking for.
"Okay, Liz says she'll let us know when she knows something." Not if. He doesn't buy if. Eventually she'll know something.
He glances sidelong at Alex, considering his profile for a long time. "It's going to be okay, you know."
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“Yeah, Michael will be fine and you said Noah is gone and my father is in a holding pattern for the time being.” He took another deep breath. “The only ones likely to come after us at the moment are my brothers.” Because he was assuming that if one of them was working for his father, they all were. Keeping it in the family and everything. And he wasn’t at all bitter that his father had decided to keep this from him. Maybe he’d known that Alex never would have agreed with him.
He pulled up to Max’s and glanced at Kyle. “I’ll be right back.”
He did a brief sweep of the area, noting the glass and the blood. Something had gone down here and it was probably where they’d been holding Noah. He checked inside, but no one was home, so he headed back to the car.
“All right. Isobel’s next. And then we’ll see if Maria’s seen him.”
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He waits in the car, texting with Liz. Thinking about other things as well.
"I need your honest opinion, Alex." He's looking out the window, not looking at Alex. "Knowing what you know, and without me literally have what I would diagnosis as a panic attack, should I be armed when dealing with your brothers?"
He's military. He knows his siblings. Kyle trusts him to be honest with him.
"And I would just end up shooting myself is a legit answer."
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“Call me. If you see any of my brothers, call me.” Maybe he should be telling Kyle to call Max, Michael, or Isabel, but these were his brothers. His family. If anyone was going to be dealing with them, making sure they couldn’t hurt anyone else, it was him. That said, he also didn’t want Kyle to be in the crossfire. They were starting to actually be friends again, good friends, like it had been before, and he wasn’t going to let his family screw up another relationship.
“And you probably would end up shooting yourself, so if you ever feel the need for lessons, let me know.” Especially if their lives continued in the path they seemed to be going down.
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"Your name's on the paperwork," he says with a nod. "You got it." Because while he'll hold his own and refuse them entry based on medical reasons, he also knows that at least one of them he can't trust to play nice, fair, or legally, and that's one too many out of three as it is.
"Kind of why I'm asking," he says softly, looking down at his phone though there's not been a message, just not looking at Alex. "It's stupid, I know, to even think about it. I realized that before, but..." But before he hadn't actually been shot and had only thought maybe the threat would be worth it. Now he knows it wouldn't be worth it just to threaten, and he'd been shot. Just because he isn't dead doesn't change that.
"I'm thinking later, after we find your errant would be boyfriend and his family, I'm going to have a nervous breakdown. I mean... I just feel I should have one," he says, speaking casually but he's just taken all of this in stride, more or less, and yet he's not sure any of it is healthy. Not to mention he's sure the moment he has a drink, and he's definitely going to have a drink, he's going to crack.
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"He's not my boyfriend," Alex added. He wasn't sure he wanted to live without Michael and Michael had promised him that they'd talk, but they were barely even friends, such as that went. He knew so little about Michael, although he'd learned a bit after he'd confronted Michael about being who and what he was.
"Look," he said, glancing over at Kyle. "I'm sorry Guerin was an ass to you yesterday. He doesn't get it." All he knew about Kyle and Alex was that Kyle had made Alex's life hell in high school. He didn't know the history behind that or even that they'd been friends once.
"Otherwise I'd suggest we all grab a couple of bottles and head out to the middle of nowhere somewhere."
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It's been too much in such a short time and he's not sure how he's going to hold himself together the moment he has a second to stop and actually think. Until then though, he can just focus on here and now.
"Hence would be," he says softly, making himself open his eyes and staring out the window rather than looking at Alex. Though he laughs at that, the sound more bitter than he means it to be. "Oh he gets it," he says with a snort. "He gets that he's jealous as all hell because we're becoming friends again. You should have seen his face when I told him we'd been working on the code together." Barely turning his head then, stealing a glance at Alex from the corner of his eye.
"Somewhere he's gotten it in his head that he's got something to fear from me, as if that's somewhere you'd go,' he says, shaking his head. "He'll get over it. Just like he'll get over the fact that I was a monster to you in high school and then we can have those drinks and nothing to worry about."
It's easy to talk about, but he's not sure how much it would be in practice. Michael likely wouldn't forgive Kyle, and maybe he can sense Kyle's remembering what had happened to turn Kyle as he had. The crush that had terrified him so badly back then.
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He frowned as he thought about it. Was Guerin really jealous of a friendship? Or had he somehow intuited his childhood crush on Kyle? Not that it would be really hard to figure out. Lots of kids had crushes on their best friend when they were the opposite gender and he'd just happened to prefer his own. And there Kyle was.
"I don't know. Maybe I'll ask him about it when we find him. We were supposed to talk." And now he wasn't sure whether he was supposed to be worried that Michael hadn't come back or angry that he hadn't.
"Do you know that I'd thought about not leaving the Air Force because I thought it would keep me one step ahead of my dad?" He shook his head. "I really should have known better. I've never managed to keep up with him."
He'd only managed to catch his dad flat-footed because his father had never assumed that Alex would have the guts to stand up to him.
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"With Noah on the loose last night, who knows... I mean, he's fine. Okay? Trust me, if anyone is fine in this, it's Guerin. Just..." He sighs. "Who knows if Max or Isobel are. Who knows how far they had to chase him," he says, realizing how horrible what he started to say is. "So it's probably that he couldn't get there to talk to you. So we'll find him, you two will fix things and you won't snap at me when I say he's your boyfriend," he says, smirking crookedly.
"Do you know why you can't keep up with him? Because you're not evil. You're not constantly thinking about six ways to cover your back and to fuck everyone over, because you're a good man, Alex Manes. Your father is a villain. He literally is constantly plotting and planning and working to keep himself ahead of everyone else. So maybe... maybe stop doing shit because of that asshole and start doing things because of you. About damn time you did things for you, Alex. You've deserved it since we were kids, and ... I know I was a kid, so I couldn't do anything to fix it but I'm sorry that I was the one that added on to it."
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"That's exactly why I agreed to go into the Air Force," he pointed out. "Because I wanted to do something more than just sit around on my hands whe someone I cared about was in danger. It's what they trained us to do. Sometimes I think it was the only worthwhile thing I came back with."
The memories, the nightmares. He didn't want those. And he didn't want the expectations his father had that Alex would just fall in line like the good little soldier he'd been. A Manes Man. Maybe that was the family curse. He wondered if any of his brothers had broken free of it or whether they were all good little soldiers like Flint.
He sighed. He really didn't want to think about how being an airman had changed him. That was a long, involved conversation that he wasn't even comfortable talking about with a therapist. It certainly wasn't fit conversation during the hunt for the Guerin-Evans's. But you could always trust Kyle to have a witty comment to fall back on, so Alex finished on that.
"Clearly I'm going to have to find something else to grouse about. You always give me something, so I figure it won't be hard."
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Now he hasn't a clue, he just knows that out of all of them, apparently he's got it easier than most of them, and more and more he's feeling he doesn't want to complain, just do what he can for them. It's why he became a doctor, so he can understand Alex's feelings on it. On what he'd hoped to gain.
"You know, I could give you a big long speech about how you can't save everyone, but given how long I cried after the last person I lost on the table, I don't think I've got room to talk about it. All you can do though is try and do your best, and a lot of other pithy comments you'll roll your eyes at," he says, turning his head to look at Alex instead of the desert.
"Well, you could get frustrated and take a shot at me." He pales a little, that turn of phrase suddenly nauseating. "Or punch. Definitely meant punch," he says, muttering softly under his breath at how saying that twisted up his gut. "Or we could drink. A lot. Black out drunk sounds like the best thing in the world right now."
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He slowed to a stop in front of Isobel's. The benefits of living in a small town. They weren't friends, but he still knew where she lived. Of course, the fact that her dad had had her information in his database had helped. And made him feel a little like Big Brother.
"If we don't find anyone...yeah, drinking might be an option."
Except it wouldn't be. He'd want to be out there figuring out what was going on. Because to have everyone disappear all at once? That meant that something was wrong.
"I'll be right back." He slipped out so he could walk over and knock at Isobel's door. When that didn't work, he tried around out back. Nothing. He started cursing under his breath. Michael had been bloody the last time Alex had seen him. He said it hadn't been his, but...
He managed not to punch anything and headed back to the car instead. "We're heading to the Wild Pony. See if Maria's heard from anyone."
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"If there's anything wrong, holler." And even as he says it, he moves to stand by the car, looking around as if hoping she would come pulling up at any minute. Except Alex comes back and nothing. Not promising, not in the least.
The longer they go without hearing from any of them he worries. He'd last hear from Liz that she was okay from the cut, that she had kept Arturo safe, and that Noah hadn't come back. It was the only news he'd had, and it had been hours ago.
Kyle nods at that, moving to get into the car. "I'm trying with Liz again but after everything, she is likely asleep. She promised to let me know if there were any issues with the cut so..." So he's hoping that everything is okay or he would have heard from her. He hopes.
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If it was enough, would he have kept pushing Michael away at every chance he got? Maybe if he hadn't, he'd know what was going on, but maybe he wouldn't. Maybe it would always be like this between them. Michael was his whole world and he couldn't be Michael's. Not with everything else he had going on.
A stray thought latched on and he glanced over at Kyle. "Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if you and I had never stopped being friends." Maybe nothing would have changed. Kyle's dad would still be dead and Alex's father would still be responsible. And now, all these years later, they were still friends of a sort.
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Like talking about how Kyle is there for him, but he hasn't been. He's been his bully. He's been the monster that made an abused kid's life even worse. Now they've been tentatively working things out, leaving that behind, but Kyle also knows the person he was, and he isn't sure how many changes makes him different. Even if there's only a few of them that likely still think about that side of him rather than the man he's become.
"You'd have had what you have now for the last ten years," he says softly, looking over to Alex from where he's staring out the window, not really seeing anything. "Someone you can turn to whenever you need anything."
Which feels like so much of too little to late, and he knows it. "Something else to hold on to."
He shifts, the sound of it loud to his own ears in the quiet of the car.
"I really a sorry, Alex. I did the same thing I think everyone else has. Taken out their issues on you. I'm really sorry."
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"Let's make a deal that that will be the last time you apologize for being a dick in high school." He paused and added, "Otherwise, you'll start a backlog for when you fuck up from here on out." If he'd felt like smiling, that would have been when he smiled, but the smile was in his voice.
"Okay? Besides, it's not like it would have changed all that much. I ran away after Michael's hand got broken when I should have stayed and done...something."
He turned to make sure Kyle knew he meant it.
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