Reconstructing Madonna - Part Three
Part Two here.
Part Three
Kyle is late.
Again.
He sighs softly and turns his focus back to the newspaper in his hands. By now his friend’s perpetual tardiness is pretty much part of the routine.
In twenty or so minutes Kyle will show up, unruffled and unapologetic. He’ll order some of the outdoor café’s awful coffee and put it on Jesse’s tab, and after snitching the sports section of the paper he’ll jingle his car keys and they’ll head out.
Sometimes it’s to Arizona. Other times it’s a smaller hospital in California. It all depends on how much time they have.
Today it’s going to have to be somewhere close. He was only able to get half the day off and has it on good authority that Kyle’s got a date lined up for later. This is a rare occurrence, and Kyle will need all the time he can spare to prepare. Despite, Max thinks with a smirk, the fact that he has a ‘stellar personality’ and ‘pecs of steel’, his friend hasn’t had a long-term relationship since Bush was reelected.
Then again, neither has he.
For one blinding, painful moment he lets all the memories rush back. He thinks of her hair, and the heavenly shade of olive her skin turns in the spring. He remembers what it felt like to look into her eyes and see acceptanceforgivenesslongingknowing… and love.
He remembers how that felt, too.
But that was a long time ago.
And usually when he thinks of her now he’s thinking of the sight of her back as she walked away so many times, and of hard eyes and stone-cold accusations.
An emotionless Dear John letter and wondering, who is this person and what did they do with the woman I’m in love with?
She never even gave him a chance to make it up to her. From the minute she heard about Tess she took back the part of herself she’d only ever given to him.
And if he held back, too, at least he was honest about it.
Old Timberlands scuffing the sidewalk. How characteristic is it that even his footfall demands attention? Max thinks.
He doesn’t need words to transmit his wry, chatty mood - somehow it flies through the air and cheerfully announces itself. There’s some new development he’s just dying to share. And if experience is anything to go on, chances are it’s something the sitting man already knows.
Possibly because they actually are friends these days or possibly because irritating the hell out of Kyle is his sole source of amusement, Max pretends he hasn’t noticed his arrival yet. Counts off the seconds in his head. One, two, three -
He coughs.
Bounces impatiently on the heels of his feet.
Sighs loudly when Max still doesn’t acknowledge him. “Well, don’t rush to pull out a chair for me or anything,” he says grumpily.
Max looks up. Can’t fight the smirk any longer. “Kyle,” he greets, nodding.
“You’re a real sadist sometimes, Evans,” he grumbles. He sits down in the other chair, drumming his hands on the table and looking around impatiently for a waitress. When he turns his attention back to Max, their eyes hold. He sags and lets out a long groan. “You know. I can’t believe you know. Does everyone?”
Max shakes his head. “She hasn’t gotten a chance to tell Michael yet. I only know because she wanted me to make sure everything looked okay before she broke the news to Jesse.”
Kyle snorts in disbelief. “You mean this was unexpected? With the way Mr. Evans has been going on you’d think he’s been trying to knock her up for months.”
Instead of having the intimidating affect it is intended to, Max’s semi-offended look only seems to spur Kyle’s sarcasm. “Okay, forgive me. He’s been planning to plant his seed in her womb in a wondrous, miraculous expression of their love for months. Jesus, he’s already looking at names. The kid’s what, about as developed as a guppy right now, right? And he’s already naming it Anthony or Christopher.”
He studies him intently. “You’ve been spending way too much time with Michael,” he finally announces.
Blue eyes peering up from beneath heavy brown bangs give Kyle the distinctive air of a kicked puppy. “Well, who else am I gonna hang out with? It’s hard to keep up with your living arrangements these days, and Isabel only calls me in when she needs girlfriend time. Whatever the hell that is.”
“After moaning for years about how aliens took over your life, I can’t believe you haven’t made a single human friend after we finally set you free,” Max retorts.
Secretly, he’s glad for this.
When Isabel announced that she and Jesse were moving to San Francisco, Max and Michael had been keeping a tight lid on their problems with the feds. Her marriage was already rocky and they knew the news had the potential to capsize it completely. And while neither of them really believed the relationship would last, they knew Jesse made Isabel happier than she’d been in a long time and weren’t inclined to see her return to the mess she’d been post-Alex.
At the time it had only been the two of them under suspicion, so they’d dealt with it on their own. Unfortunately, they had no way of knowing when Khivar or the Special Unit would turn their attentions to her. Leaving her unprotected wasn’t an option.
As it turns out, Jesse has a better weirdness threshold than they’d given him credit for. He genuinely loves Isabel, and after spending some time around him Max has had to admit that any control issues his sister’s husband might have pale in comparison to his own, or even those of their adoptive father’s. In short, Jesse Ramirez is nothing Isabel can’t handle.
It doesn’t hurt that he’s got a gun and damn good aim, either.
But they didn’t know that then. So Kyle’s decision to tag along, however impure his motivations were, had been viewed by the two brothers as a godsend.
It was Max and Michael, ironically enough, who ended up benefiting the most from Kyle’s presence. Having a human around - even if the human is Kyle - helps to anchor them. Whether it’s obligation or genuine friendship, something about that bond helps give Max and Michael the will to run from the Special Unit, to care one way or another if the federal agents chasing them want them dead.
And for Max at least, sometimes it’s hard to find a reason to stay on Earth without Liz.
Besides, after seven and a half years, Kyle is still convinced that at some point he’s going to become an alien glo-stick, and says he’d prefer to be with his own kind when it happens.
Michael finds this disturbingly amusing.
For Max it just brings back pieces of a past better left buried.
He hopes that the fact they haven’t heard from Liz in so long is because her changes are under control. That, as painful as it is to contemplate, she just doesn’t need or want him in her life. It’s still a hell of a lot better than any alternatives.
Maria said Liz was doing well the last time they saw each other. Still, he wonders sometimes. He thinks he probably always will.
She must know that he would be there in a heartbeat if she asked. That he gets it now.
Yes, he hurt her. No, it wasn’t intentional. And maybe he didn’t have the right to expect her forgiveness when he wasn’t ready to trust her fully again. Maybe they needed time apart and maybe he should have been better at showing her how much he respected her, how sorry he was for everything.
He glances at Kyle and sees him looking at him worriedly. His eyes are crinkled in concern. “You probably don’t want to hear about this, though. I mean, this whole thing with Isabel and Jesse has to be like a slap in the face to you and Michael. Knowing that it could have been you and Liz or him and Maria.”
His hands ball into fists, crumpling and tearing the paper in his grasp.
A baby with Liz.
How many times did he dream of that? How many times did he hope that after finding his son Liz would look at him and somehow forget that he wasn’t hers? Those dreams are gone now, fallen at his feet the second Liz lost faith in him.
He wonders if she ever believed in him.
“Look,” he says, doing his best to sidestep the issue (because isn’t that what he does best?), “what if I drive this time? At least on the way down.”
Kyle raises his eyebrows. Laughs. “Evans, even if I did trust you with my car, you’re forgetting the fact that you haven’t driven a car in years. Jesus, you don’t even have a license, do you?”
Of course he doesn’t.
How can he, when he doesn’t exist?
-
Michael’s lying to Isabel.
Max is too, of course, but it’s different. Isabel knows that he’s not really at work right now, the same way she knows that he’s not really doing better and that the nightmares haven’t really stopped. She actually believes that Michael’s spending his Saturday blasting rocks in the wilderness.
Instead he’s holed up in his apartment trying to develop a resistance to the Special Unit’s serum.
When they realized that MetaChem was supplying much more important customers than a few Podunk pharmacies, Max’s first reaction had been to run.
Michael had already raided their storerooms and been captured on five different security cameras by then. Naturally.
It had been over a year since Maria’s impulsive return to Roswell and Max hadn’t talked to his parents in months. Faking their deaths was easy enough. They fled from New Mexico, Max chased by nauseating reminders of the White Room and Michael toting the serum that had once rendered Max helpless.
When Max asked him why he bothers, Michael told him that the only way the government’s getting him is in a body bag. This failed to be comforting.
What Michael doesn’t seem to get is that there’s a reason the serum hasn’t been tampered with in over fifty years. It does its job with a terrible, horrifying precision.
There is no getting used to it. There is no escaping the sickening, disoriented feeling that crowds you upon injection.
He should know. He’s spent the better part of a decade drowning in that sensation every time he closes his eyes.
“Hey, Miracle Worker, wake up. We’re heeeere.”
Someone should tell Kyle that whining makes his voice sound like nails on a chalkboard.
He pulls himself up. Partly glad (because honestly, the crappy backseat cushions were giving him five different kinds of knots) and partly apprehensive (because the healings will never dull in intensity, and he knows he wouldn’t want them to).
“So what’s the plan, Max?”
Max looks at the hospital critically. It’s small. That means easier to navigate. But it’s probably also going to be ten times harder to get into unnoticed.
“Just keep the car here. I shouldn’t be inside for more than an hour. If I’m not back by then, I guess you should just leave me.”
Kyle grips the steering wheel hard. Knuckles whitening. “Don’t give me any of that shit, Evans. You’ll be fine.” He pauses. Turns around to consider his serious friend. Clearing his throat uncomfortably, he admits, “And even if you weren’t, there’s no way I’d be leaving without you.”
They both know it.
But still, it’s a bittersweet kind of reassurance to hear it spoken out loud.
“Thanks, Kyle. And for more than just…”
“Yeah, yeah. Go. Do your magic. I want to see us on the five o’clock news.”
-
He doesn’t look at anyone over fifty.
When he first started doing this, he healed whoever he saw first. You get a lot of stroke and heart attack victims that way, though, and most of them are either too far gone to be helped or genuinely don’t want to be alive anymore.
He’s not in the business of saving people against their will.
Children’s oncology is his specialty.
Cancer is trickier to obliterate than most illnesses. It’s insidious and clever and sometimes he feels like he’s the one dying after healing a terminal patient.
But cancer also takes the most innocents. And if the choice to heal an adult can be excruciating, there’s never been a second of hesitation when it comes to the kids.
Because he thinks that maybe they’re the only ones with any real right to live. With adults it can be harder to tell. There are too many sins and good deeds to weigh; too much trouble comparing their desire to live to that niggling compulsion they have to give up. Before he knows it he’s playing God.
He generally tries to avoid that, too.
He pauses outside the neonatal nursery.
It’s hard for him to be here. For obvious reasons.
They’re still the ones who need him the most.
The first one he heals is a little girl. He’s guessing she was born at about five months. Underdeveloped lungs, sky-high temperature.
She’s a fighter. All she needs from him is a nudge.
He swears she smiles at him after he’s done.
It’s been an eventful hour. He’s feeling guilty, because Max knows he doesn’t have the energy for even one more.
He still scans the boy sleeping next to her.
Gasps. Whole body shaking. Tears stinging his eyes.
Multiple birth defects, including an extremely weak heart. Some sort of internal damage he can’t really get a handle on.
Even with Max’s help there wouldn’t have been a chance.
Then -
He feels her. For the first time in years, he can feel her invading every pore of his body, wrapping around him and refusing to let go.
Her warmth. Her beauty. Her compassion.
Her overwhelming anguish that she can’t save this baby.
And he’s not sure if what he’s feeling is alien-related or true or even the slightest bit real, but he thinks it’s telling him what he needs to do.
“Come on, baby. Just look at me. Just for a minute,” he urges.
Sure enough, agitated brown eyes open. They peer out of a sickly and jaundiced face, but they’re still the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
He focuses on his favorite memory. The abandoned van and Liz.
With one touch, one memory, he tries to show this child everything he’ll miss.
The overwhelming joy and sorrow that are so often intermingled in this crazy, unreasonable world.
The fierce will to live if it means just one more minute like this one.
A love so fearsome and earth-shattering that it has no difficulty healing everything it destroys.
Knowledge that it’s worth enduring humanity’s worst if you get to glimpse its best.
He tries to show him the transcendental.
Hopes like he’s never hoped for anything that somehow, some way, he’s succeeded.
-
He stumbles out of the emergency exit sobbing.
So glad, so fucking grateful, that it wasn’t his son in there.
It could’ve been. For awhile he thought it would be.
But in the end Zan is safe and (hopefully) happy and he… is alone.
He’s so tired of being alone.
Kyle’s voice breaks through the animalistic howls (are they his? He thinks they must be). “Aw, shit. Max… Max.”
He cries harder.
An arm winds around his shoulder. Helps him back to the car. “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay, Max. Come on, let’s get you home.”
Home.
The word worms its way into his heart, and he immediately thinks of Liz. Knows that she’s the truest home he’s ever known, and that she’s lost to him now.
Home is Isabel, and the baby she’s carrying inside of her. Home is Michael in all of his rash, paranoid glory.
Fuck, home right now is Kyle Valenti.
And he can’t find it in him to complain.
It’s more than that baby will ever know.
He’s glad he shared the person and the love that will always feel like true north to him.
He just hopes it was enough.
Part Four