Archive of Our Own

Michael’s been leaning into that empty feeling.

After an hour of picking through the guts of an ancient Chevrolet Chevelle, he drops the hood with a sigh. “Looks like you’ve wheezed your last breath, old girl.” He packs his toolkit and resigns the Chevrolet to the graveyard of neglected “projects” Sanders keeps scattered around the place. Not that he’s surprised; the thing’s been sitting in one spot so long, she’s practically growing moss.

He pats the hood. “Think Sanders’ll notice if you’re missing a few extra pieces?”

Dipping down to peek under the chassis, he’s met with an overgrowth of weeds and an orange crust of rust. A combination of time, weather, and wild animals has chewed through the tires until they can hardly be called tires anymore. Inside, the tan leather upholstery has long since sun-bleached itself to death: left cracked and desiccated as the desert itself.

“Yeah, pretty sure nobody’s touched you since the Nixon administration,” Michael puffs, wiping his hands on the hem of his shirt.

He wouldn’t say he’s made a habit out of pawning scrap from Sander’s yard, but he’s dabbled—especially in the summer when work gets lean; winter’s where the real money is, when all those heat-sturdy desert cars drain their batteries in the cold.

And a man can’t be blamed for needing to eat. Right?

Halfway back to his workbench, he fumbles his toolbox when his left hand seizes up. It drops straight down, but a socket wrench goes skittering across the dirt and he genuinely considers leaving it there out of pure spite.

Heaving a sigh that’s only slightly more dramatic than the situation really calls for, he collects the wayward wrench and tucks the box under his arm the rest of the way. He clangs it down onto the workbench and considers clocking out early, finding something better to do with the rest of his night.

Truth is, it’s boring in Roswell.

Max always said boring was better. Boring keeps all of them safe. Michael tries to be grateful for it. After all, “boring” leaves him plenty of time to plot courses in his head—to climb down into the bunker and aim his toolkit at the stars. And that’s something.

But Michael feels like someone’s holding his head below water. Like he’s drowning in a birdbath. Like his whole world stops at the county line: trapped in a town that could fit on the head of a pin, fenced in on all sides by this impossible, unending swathe of sky.

He fell into a routine and he never fell out of it.

So, maybe he steals a few parts. Copper wire, hubcaps, shock absorbers and struts. He does what he has to do. He’ll make it out of this place one way or another.

Whatever hopes a future he had in this town—hell, maybe even on this planet—they got put in the ground with Rosa Ortecho.

(He used to have big dreams. At 12, he took apart a broken ham radio and put it back together better than the company that made it. Even the deadbeat foster family he was living with sat up and took notice.

There was a cash prize for the science fair that year. He won, but he never saw the money.

He started taking the radio out into the desert. He’d scan crackly, static-ridden stations and pretend they were broadcasting from a hell of a lot farther away than Austin and Phoenix. Someone, somewhere, had to be looking for him. They had to be.

He’d turn the dial to the most garbled, inhuman sounding station he could find and lie in the dirt and pretend the twinkle of the stars was the morse code of the universe. He’d count each flicker of light, writing tables of nonsense sequencing in his head.

He’d fall asleep.)

“You gonna be a problem tonight?”

Maria doesn’t look at Michael as she pours him his whiskey. He’s grateful; he always feels just a little too transparent around her. A little too seen. And tonight, he doesn’t want to be known or understood or listened to.

He’s sparking like a tesla coil, hungry for a hit of adrenaline. Maria must smell it on him, given the way she hesitates before pushing his drink across to him.

He plays stupid. Propping his elbows on the bar, he aims a beatific grin her way. “Aw, c’mon, Deluca,” he singsongs. “You know me.”

She snorts. “Wish I didn’t.”

He hunches over his glass and tries not to look stung. “Yeah, well,” he drawls. “Get in line.”

The Pony’s busy for a Wednesday. The din of voices rumbles to a low roar beneath the music. He feels at home here with the booze and the noise—all at once comfortable and unsettled. Like he’s walking a knife’s edge, just waiting for an excuse to go over.

Maybe Maria can tell he’s restless. Maybe she’s just planning for the worst like everyone else always has. But she casts him a skeptical look and says, “If I have to kick you out before you settle your tab, I’m doubling it.”

“Hey, you know I’m good for it,” he argues.

“Only thing you’re good for is giving me a headache.” For all her noble attempts to keep a straight face and look intimidating, something awful close to a smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. She narrows her eyes and him. “Didn’t I ban you?”

Clicking his teeth, he grins at her over the lip of his glass. “Oh, at least twice.”

With a roll of her eyes and a laugh, she waves him off. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth, Guerin.”

There’s no real bite behind the words, and yet they ache just a little—somewhere deep down that he doesn’t want to look at. So, he doesn’t. He pushes it down, beneath the ankle-deep water festering at the bottom of himself.

“Bet you say that to all the girls,” he purrs with a wink. It earns him and unimpressed glare and a barely concealed grin, and he calls that a victory. Getting to his feet, he throws his head back and downs his whiskey in one swallow.

“Behave!” She calls after him as he disappears into the crowd.

He blows a kiss. “You know I won’t!”

Michael Guerin goes looking for trouble. That’s what everybody says.

Hell, once up on a time, it wasn’t even true. He kept his nose down, but trouble always had a way of finding him. These days, though, Michael cultivates his bad reputation—leans into it until it becomes its own kind of safety net.

Growing up, he never felt like had any control of the way the world saw him. He was an orphan, a problem child, a freak, a demon.

He gets called more mundane things, now: a cowboy. A deadbeat. A drunk. The names sting less when he knows what he did to deserve them. Besides, he’d rather be a drifter than a possession.

Better off broke than haunted.

(After his failed exorcism, he went back into the system. The overworked woman in charge of his file began—as gently as possible—referring to him as “difficult to place”. He hated the way she said it. Like she felt sorry for him. Like he was a stray dog, too old or broken or ugly to get adopted.

He didn’t mean to cause trouble. He didn’t mean to be a freak of nature. But he bounced around foster homes anyway: never good enough or quiet enough or timid enough to stay. “It’s just not a good fit,” his social worker would reassure him. “We’ll find a better one.”

Santa Fe, Carlsbad, Albuquerque. He stopped believing in better. He stopped trying to put down roots. Nothing ever taught his heart to tumbleweed better than those long, speechless car rides with his social worker.

One of those car rides ended in the driveway of Adam and Christine Peyton.

Christine was an unsuccessfully stern woman—the kind of parent who always tried to put her foot down but never seemed to get any traction. Her daughter, Riley, outright ignored her more often than not. Christine was bitter and passive aggressive but largely toothless. An unhappy woman in an unhappy marriage.

Adam, on the other hand, was an average-sized man living an average-sized life, tormented by the scope of his own mediocrity. When he was sober, he operated with a resentful sort of meekness. But the longer Michael stayed with the Peytons, the less often he saw Adam sober. Adam was a building pressure in the Peyton household—the threat of violence that loomed over all of them, inevitable. Every slammed door, every broken plate, every shouting match brought the family closer to the boiling point.

But for the first time in years, Michael was in Roswell again—and he wasn’t willing to give that up for anything or anybody. So, he played nice. He was better at controlling his powers, now. He almost never slipped up.

But when he did, there was almost always somebody watching.

They wrote it off, at first. Strange coincidences, drafty halls, creaking pipes, whatever else they could reason it away with.

That is, until shows like Ghost Hunters and Most Haunted Homes in America brought ghost stories back into vogue. Suddenly, local news channels were flooded with “docu-series” about the “science” behind hauntings. They all bolstered the same, poorly lit, shaky cam reenactments of troubled teens arguing with their parents while some PA off-camera hurled plates across the room. He used to close his eyes and count his breaths and pretend it didn’t get to him.

But even with his eyes closed, he could always feel the Peytons looking at him.

“Maybe that’s what’s wrong with him,” Riley stage-whispered to the friend she had over.

He dug his fingernails into his palms. It was bullshit. Adam had thrown more glass at the wall with his bare hands than Michael ever had with his powers.

“Riley!” Christine scolded half-heartedly. She didn’t even look away from the TV to do it.

“I’m just saying.” His foster sister aimed an unfriendly grin at him. “Maybe we got a haunted one.”

“I’m not haunted,” he argued on a squeak. At 14, the pubescent crack in his voice wasn’t intimidating anyone. But the smell of ozone flooded the room. The air crackled around him. He could feel it sparking in his lungs, spinning from frustration into fury.

A tin candleholder careened off the mantle with a clatter.

Christine whirled around to look at him. “Michael!”

All at once, the electricity vanished. He was left small and cowed. “It wasn’t me,” he blurted. “I didn’t do anything!”

He didn’t want it to be a lie. Maybe that counted for something.

Riley held his gaze, a terrible glee on her face when she leaned closer to her friend and singsonged, “I knew he looked like a freak when they adopted him.”

Michael’s “they didn’t adopt me” and Christine’s “we didn’t adopt him” blurred together into a single sentence.

He tried not to flinch, but he wasn’t any good at pretending, yet.)

“I had a lot of money riding on that game you just ruined,” a drunken townie snarls in Michael’s face. He has him by the collar, dragged up on his toes, close enough to kiss. He reeks of cheap beer and cigarettes.

Excitement brews electric and ugly in Michael’s chest.

Starting fights in small towns is easy. The real trick is getting the other guy to throw the first punch.

Michael doesn’t want to think. He wants this meathead to ring his skull like a bell. He wants the heady hit of adrenaline and the ache of a good bruise—the strobing, slow-motion disorientation of an unfair fight.

But Michael’s got an ace up his sleeve. It doesn’t really matter how big the townie is; Michael could drag his feet out from under him with his hands tied behind his back.

But he won’t.

Where’s the fun in that?

(“Most Punchable Face in Roswell,” Isobel once told him, “Is not the bad ass compliment you think it is.”

He leaned back in his lawn chair, kicking up his feet. “Agree to disagree, Iz.”

She was trying to be serious, underneath the teasing. But he wasn’t ready to listen.

“You’re gonna get hurt, Michael.”

With a knowing smile and a click of his teeth, he drawled, “You know, it’s almost like I thought of that.”)

Tension crackles the air. The townie goes red from the neck up, until he looks overinflated and ready to pop. Michael might as well be vibrating. The two of them stand balanced on a knife’s edge and, god, he wants to push them over.

He casts a gleeful nod over the townie’s shoulder, pointing his chin at a woman leaned up against the pool table. Voice pitched to a whisper, he purrs, “Bet she only goes home with winners. Just you and your hand tonight, Tiny?”

It’s all it takes.

The top of Tiny’s skull connects right between Michael’s eyes, and he goes staggering backwards. Pain starbursts his vision. Blurting a manic, dizzy laugh, he reels up to grin at him. “Struck a nerve, huh?” He slurs. “Gotta prove you’re all big and tough?”

The tables nearby ripple into a stilted quiet, all eyes on them. The room hangs like a held breath. Or maybe that’s just the acetone talking.

Michael lurches forward. He backs a swing with all his weight and momentum.

It’s like hitting a redwood. Tiny doesn’t flinch, doesn’t sway, doesn’t give. Michael’s fist thumps uselessly against that square jaw and doesn’t so much as turn his head.

A giant hand claps around his wrist hard enough to make the joint pop.

“You really shouldn’t’ve done that.”

(When the first psychic came to the house, Michael didn’t really know what she was there for. She was shorter than he was, with a round face and nest of greying blonde hair. She wandered the halls tutting softly, touching the walls, pausing every so often to throw her hand over her heart and comment on the energy.

The family wandered along behind her, watching her work. Riley followed Michael like a shadow. She hovered right outside his periphery.

“What’s your problem?” He hissed softly, whirling around to look at her.

She wore a grin wider than her face. She was 12 and vindictive. If he was honest with himself, they had more in common than they didn’t—not that either of them would ever admit it.

“She’s here because of you,” Riley informed him. “Because they know you’re a freak.”

He’d been called worse.

It still stung.

The psychic didn’t stay long. She did her sweep of the house, rattled off an uninspiring and over-rehearsed monologue about cleansing the space, offered her rate, and left.

She wouldn’t be the last.)

For a big guy, the townie sure moves fast. One of those sledgehammer fists connects with Michael’s stomach, sending him buckling. The buzz of adrenaline starts to sour into fear. He reaches for his powers but it’s like he misses—like they slip through his fingers. He’s too disoriented and the bar is too crowded.

This is what he wanted, wasn’t it?

Fuck.

He plants his hands on the sticky, polished concrete floor while the world whirls on its axis. He stops trying to stand up.

A shadow falls over him. He squeezes shut his eyes and waits for a kick.

“Tommy,” barks a familiar voice.

Michael blinks the stars from his eyes, head lolling on his shoulders. And there she is: Maria DeLuca, haloed by the florescent lights like a goddamned angel.

“I think you boys have had enough for tonight.” She casts the townie a sharp, unfriendly smile, her voice saccharine when she informs him, “Don’t have to go home, but you sure as hell can’t stay here.”

(The second psychic called herself a paranatural investigative medium. Or at least, that’s what it said on her business cards. In theory, it was probably supposed to suggest some kind of credentials. In practice, it meant she paired her crystals and spooky buzzwords with pop pseudoscience.

“Poltergeists,” she explained offhandedly as she waved a homemade EMF meter around, “tend to latch onto teenagers. It’s a very turbulent time, y’know? They’re vulnerable.” She wandered the house much like the first psychic had, this time with the addition of the beeping ghost speedometer. Michael hung back, watching from a safe distance.

Of course, once the psychic finally spotted him, she charged towards him with purpose. He froze up, glued in place by some unnamed and unexpected panic.

It was just a lady with a jerry-rigged walkie-talkie in her hands. Why the hell was he so scared?

Eyes squeezed shut, he couldn’t dispel the image of the priest’s red and sweaty face, the Latin prayers, the shape of a cross seared into his arm.

He forced himself to count. Halfway to ten, and he let go of the breath he didn’t know he was holding. Before he hit fifteen, a pair of cold hands took him by the face and tipped his head upwards.

The psychic looked older up-close. He could see all the places where her makeup settled into the lines of her face, leaving thick, caked-on creases.

“Have you had trouble with him?” She asked the Peytons, like he wasn’t standing right there—like he was a family pet that wasn’t housetrained.

“Plenty,” Adam answered curtly.

“I can feel it,” she agreed. Closing her eyes, she made a show of shaking in her boots while her brows drew tighter and tighter together.

It was a performance for an audience of four, but she played it like she was gunning for an Emmy.

“There’s something very dark around him,” she warbled. In a flash, her eyes went wide and focused on the wall a few steps behind him. “Right there,” she whispered, “over his shoulder.”

The Peytons were eating out of her hand. Christine recoiled and Riley tipped in closer—only to be yanked backwards by the shirt collar by her mother. Adam stood stone-faced and inscrutable. Michael didn’t like that he couldn’t tell what his foster father was thinking. It made him too hard to predict.

“I don’t see anything,” Christine squeaked.

The psychic breezed past the lot of them to dig through her bag. Mumbling to herself, she hummed, “No—no, it could spread to the whole house at this rate.”

“What could?” Adam demanded, his voice pitched just a little too loud.

Distantly, Michael could hear the low, metallic shivering sound that meant his powers were rattling the silverware in the kitchen. No one else had noticed, too distracted by the melodrama the psychic was stirring up. He had to ball his fists and count his breaths to force the spoons and butter knives silent again.

“I think it’s using him as an anchor,” the psychic said, although it was hard to tell if she was answering Adam’s question or continuing her own myopic monologue. “Aha—” She interrupts herself, pulling a clunky pair of vintage headphones from her bag. No wire on them. The auxiliary cord had been pulled out, leaving an obvious hole where the input should feed in.

She fit the cans over her ears and Michael dug his nails into his palms. Eyes glued to the floor, he muttered a defeated, “This is bullshit.”

It earned him a gentler than usual shove and a sharp, “Watch your mouth, boy.”

“We should hurry,” the psychic insisted. She spun the dials on what looked like a portable radio. “Before it gets its hooks in any deeper.”)

Maria doesn’t kick Michael out so much as point him in the right direction and push. He stumbles onto the deck of the Pony feeling real smug for a man who just lost a fight. If you could even call it a fight. In the end, Tommy and his goons cared more about the threat of losing their favorite watering hole than they did about kicking the shit out of Michael.

But he’s riding high on his shot of adrenaline. Reality can’t get him down.

Maria watches him stagger down the steps. “Sleep it off, Guerin.”

“Thanks for the assist.” He spins on his heel and shoots her a mock salute. “Knew there was a reason you’re my favorite psychic.”

She remains unimpressed. “Do not thank me. I didn’t do it for you.”

He squints up at her, tucking his hands into his jacket pockets and rocking on his heels. “Okay,” he singsongs. “Then who’d you do it for?”

Scoffing, she settles her weight on one foot and glares at him, but he can see the hint of a smile peeking out under the frustration. “Barfights are bad for business.”

He grins. “And brain-injured cowboys make for bad company.”

She grins back. “You were already bad company.”

“Aw, you’re breaking my heart, DeLuca.”

She wrinkles her nose at him, taking a few steps closer and looking him up and down. “Nice try,” she drawls, and his heart does something funny in his chest, “but the Bambi eyes don’t work on me. And I’m putting damages on your tab.”

He raises his hands in surrender. “Hey, I had nothing to do with that pool cue.”

“What pool cue?!” Maria demands, but her irritation runs out of steam before the words have even finished leaving her mouth. With a roll of her eyes and an exasperated glare, she decides, “You know what? Don’t answer that. Just give me your keys and go home before Tommy and his boys circle back around.”

He steps in just a little too close when he drops his keys into her open palm. She looks up at him. He finds himself dizzy in a way that has nothing to do with the alcohol. Leaning in, she plants two fingers in the center of his chest and rocks him backwards off his balance.

“And you’re banned,” she tells him cheerfully. “Again.”

A few clumsy steps back and he’s upright again, laughing the butterflies out of his chest. He tips his hat at her, specifically because he knows she finds it more obnoxious than charming.

“See you in a week, DeLuca!”

“See you in hell, Guerin!”

Split lip or no, Michael grins the whole walk home.

(Psychic number three brought a camera crew.

Or, really, the camera crew brought a psychic. And a news broadcaster. And somebody with a lot more expensive-looking equipment than the last one had. Half a dozen people elbowed their way into the Peyton’s home, dragging boom mics and reflectors and cameras and soundboards behind them.

Dread ate through his stomach in millimeters. At best, he was going to spend the next god knew how many hours feeling like a bug under glass. At worst—

He didn’t really want to think about all the ways this could go wrong.

The psychic—or, as the director kept calling her, the spiritual consultant—started making her rounds right off the bat: dragging her fingers along the walls, clutching her pearls, the usual. It was old hat, at this point. As the others filed in, she pulled Adam and Christine to one side, speaking too quiet to hear but casting unsubtle glances Michael’s direction.

The man with the utility belt full of beeping EMFs and slow gargling Geiger counters started piling hardware onto the kitchen table.

“Can you hold this?” He asked Michael without even really looking at him.

Michael took what looked like an antique radio antenna in his hands. Immediately, the machine it was attached to started whirring and pinging. He smacked it with the heel of his hand. “Damn thing’s always doing this,” he murmured to no one. Certainly not to Michael.

Michael carefully set the metal contraption back down and took a step back from it, but the man had already forgotten about him—lost, instead, in a bag full of differently sized socket wrenches.

“How’s this?” He heard the news reporter ask as she adjusted a half-step to the left to compensate for the light pouring in from the kitchen behind her. The man behind the camera shot her a thumbs up, and she clicked on—so different and so sudden that Michael would have sworn he watched an entirely new woman settle across her face. The director called for quiet on the set and suddenly Michael was the star of his own after school special.

The anxiety that had settled in his stomach began to spool up his throat like a living thing trying to crawl its way out. He stood with his arms pressed to his sides, stock still as if he could bolt his heels to the laminate.

“Many believe that ghosts are often tied to the home or to the land,” the reporter explained, her tone regimented and practiced. “But it’s said that poltergeists attach themselves to people. Perhaps they cross over from the other side, or perhaps they are manifestations of a tormented mind.”

The laugh that burbled from Michael’s mouth was more panicked than incredulous. He clapped a hand over his mouth too late—caught in his foster father’s glare like a deer in headlights.

“Keep rolling,” the director drawled with a spin of his finger.

“Today, we’re in the home of a very disturbed young man from Roswell, New Mexico. The Peyton family claims that their brushes with the supernatural began not long after they started fostering young Michael.”

Michael retreated into his hoodie and tried to pretend his heart wasn’t racing.

One mistake and they were all toast. Him, Isobel, Max. Their secret, their lives, it could all come crashing down around them and it would be his fault. Because he couldn’t keep a lid on his powers. Because he couldn’t ever fit in. Because no matter what he did or said, nobody ever wanted to keep him.

His breath was rushed and shallow. He knew the more upset he got, the harder it would be to rein his powers in, but that knowledge only spiraled the panic further. If he messed this up, America was getting its proof of aliens right there on tape.

“Alright, and cut. We’re gonna start the interviews with the kid. Let’s regroup in the living room.”

Michael didn’t move. He couldn’t. He stared down at his shoes until Adam came up behind him and shoved him less than gently in the direction of the living room.

“I don’t want to do this,” he whispered down at his feet. He kept trying to spin together the right combination of excuses he could use to escape, but his mind had gone blank.

“That’s too damn bad,” Adam tutted flatly.

Urgent and hushed, Michael whirled to face him with a pleading, “You didn’t say there would be cameras—”

No one was left in the kitchen to see Adam’s palm connect with Michael’s cheek, but they all must have heard it. He was glued to the spot, shocked and shaking, one hand over his mouth. But the look on his face when he glared up at his foster father—it wasn’t fear.

“This is why no one wants you,” Adam spat at him.

“SHUT UP,” Michael shrieked, voice cracking at the vowels. But it was drowned out by the screech of the kitchen table careening across the room before pitching onto its side with a crash.

In the living room, the crew scrambled—ducking behind their expensive equipment. Michael stood in the center of it all, panting.

And terrified.

Icy resignation locked his jaw shut. His pulse pounded in his ears.

“Jesus Christ,” the director peeped from behind his monitor. “What the fuck was that?”)

“Rise and shine, cowboy. It’s noon.”

Michael wakes up bruised, sore, hungover, and—most importantly—with an uninvited guest sitting across from him. With a groan, he drags the pillow over his face.

“Come back with a warrant.”

He doesn’t even have to look at Isobel to know she’s grinning—all smug and self-satisfied and holier-than-thou. She drops a set of keys in the center of his chest. “Brought you your truck,” she chimes. “You’re welcome.”

He peeks out from under the pillow. “You’re loud.”

“You look like shit.”

“Yeah, well,” he drones. The keys jingle into his lap when he sits up. “You should see the other guy.” Turning the keys over, he asks, “How’d you know? ‘Cause I’m damn sure DeLuca didn’t call you.”

She wrinkles her nose at him.

“Noah saw your truck in the Pony parking lot on his way to work.” She grabs his chin to turn his head and get a better look at the goose egg on his forehead, but he wrestles free with a petulant puff.

“It’s fine,” he insists, ruffling his hair forward to hide it. “I’m fine.”

“Yeah?” Isobel volleys back skeptically. “’Cause you look hurt. And forgive me if I don’t appreciate the poetry of you pulling stupid, dangerous shit for no reason. What if you had to go to the hospital?”

“I had it under control,” he promises.

“You,” she says, “can push people over with your brain. But you keep losing fights to middle aged drunks in dive bars. Kinda starting to feel like it’s on purpose.” When he doesn’t rise to the bait, she blows out a frustrated sigh and her expression softens. “I know you don’t care if you get hurt. But what happens to me and Max when you do?”

“It’s not gonna happen.”

“What if it does?”

He glances down at his lap. “You’ll be fine.”

The edge of the bed bows where she sits down beside him.

“We won’t, though.” Even without her powers, sometimes it seems like Isobel can see right through him. “All these years you’ve been playing the big, bad, lone wolf. But we’re still here, you know?” When he doesn’t answer, she heaves another sigh. “You can’t just pretend like this is normal, Michael. It isn’t.”

“No offense, Iz,” he drawls, still staring at his hands, “but you’ve been pretending to be normal our entire lives.”

It’s a weak attempt at a deflection and they both know it.

She snorts. “You know, just because you say ‘no offense’ doesn’t make it less offensive.”

Michael can feel her watching him, but he doesn’t break the silence and he doesn’t meet her gaze, just picks at a loose stitch in his comforter.

Finally, Isobel bumps their shoulders together. “You should talk to Max,” she tells him.

He raises an eyebrow and lifts his head. “And why would I do that?”

She offers a quiet smile. “He was always better at this than me. He gets you.”

Michael puffs a disbelieving laugh and drops back down against his pillows. “Yeah,” he agrees sarcastically, “We’re real peas in a pod.”

He and Max don’t talk anymore. Not since Rosa. What they did, all the secrets they kept, all the lives they ruined to save their own skins, the lies they told Isobel—

None of it makes for very good conversation. These days, they only talk when Max gives his disappointed speeches from the other side of the drunk tank.

Isobel pats his knee and levers herself to her feet. “Think about it,” she urges him. “He’s been more nostalgic than usual, lately. He misses you.”

“I’ll think about it,” he drones back.

“Will you?” She hovers in the doorway, tapping her temple when she teases, “You know I can check.”

He tosses his pillow in the general direction of the door, voice pitched with blatantly fake cheerfulness when he drawls, “M’kay, thanks for coming.”

She leaves, but he stays there with the keys clutched in his good hand, staring up at the metal ceiling, until long after the sound of her car’s motor dwindles into the distance.

(“Fucking hell, Spencer, tell me you were rolling.”

The camera man blinked at the director, gaping like a fish. “Y-yeah, I mean—yes, yeah, I wasn’t—I mean, I wasn’t pointing right at it but, yeah.”

The crew swarmed the splintered table first. They took pictures, scanned it with the beeping, whirring machinery, nudged it with the toe of their boots, all while Spencer circled it with his Steadicam. The world seemed to move in slow motion up until the moment the director turned over his shoulder to lock eyes with Michael.

Then everything happened very, very fast.

It was over. It was all over. The segment would air. The feds would find him. And Max and Isobel. They’d all be carted off to some underground bunker to spend the rest of their lives in glass jars. Someone shoved a microphone into his face.

Over the shoulders of the crew, Michael locked eyes with the Peytons. He expected the horror on their faces, but not the disgust.

A demon, the last family had called him. The Peytons didn’t say it; they didn’t have to.

What do you call a ghost story when you’re the ghost?

He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. His ears rang. His hands shook. He could feel the electric tug of his powers crackling up his spine, making the hair at the nape of his neck stand on end. It was going to happen again. He was going to do it again.

And then he saw Max.

Max, who hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, standing up on his toes to peer through the high windows in the foyer—nothing but a pair of wide eyes and a fluff of unruly brown hair.

I knew you were in trouble.

Michael didn’t hear the words so much as feel them: a resonance between the tuning forks of his ribs.

He shook his head, frantic and terrified. Go, he thought, as loud as he could. Get Isobel and run.

Either Max didn’t hear him or didn’t listen. Before Michael could blink, he’d let himself in the front door, peering around the corner.

“Did it work?” Max asked loudly.

All the adults in the room whirled toward the door. Michael saw the gears in Max’s head turning, but he didn’t understand whatever slap-dash excuse for a plan Max seemed to think he had.

“Oh, wow!” Max bounced into the kitchen fueled by an anxious giddiness. “That table really got some air, huh?”

“What are you doing?” Michael squeaked in a register only audible to dogs.

“We totally got ‘em!” Max cheered, pitching into awkward laughter that crashed through the quiet of the room like an anchor. He slung an arm around Michael’s shoulder, but Michael couldn’t seem to school his expression into something to match his. He stood wild-eyed and tense.

“Oh man,” Max sighed brightly, “You should have seen the looks on your faces.”

“Michael,” Adam barked, low and sharp in a way that made his stomach drop. “What does he mean?”

Max steamrolled past the icy discomfort that had befallen the room and clung to his painted-on smile like a life raft. “We’ve been planning this for months!” He gave a halting laugh only to circle back around and bashfully admit, “I mean, things got a little out of hand. We didn’t think a news crew was gonna show up, but—"

Clapping him on the back, Max squeezed his shoulder hard enough that it finally knocked him out of his stupor.

“Uh, yeah,” Michael rushed to agree. “What Max said. It was a prank. We did it together, all the—” He waved a hand, struggling to look anyone in the eye. “Ghost stuff.” He swallowed hard; the room was a shaken champagne bottle, ready to pop. “We planned it.”

“You planned it,” Adam echoed back, dangerous in a way that was more immediate than the idea of being carted off to Area 51.

The squeak in Max’s voice had nothing to do with puberty when he croaked, “C’mon, Mr. Peyton, it was a joke.”

The psychic, the reporter, and the crew were already packing away their fancy equipment, shutting off their lights.

“Max,” Adam warned, “I think it’s time for you to go home.”)

“They sent me back after that,” Michael sighs, sinking deeper into his seat.

About two hours ago, he showed up at Max’s door with a six pack and a couple of joints. They wound up here, in Max’s backyard, reminiscing about the Peytons, of all people.

“You know what?” Max mutters around an inhale. “Fuck ‘em.”

Stealing the joint from Max’s grasp, Michael snorts a laugh. “No arguments here.” The lit cherry burns like its own star underneath the black stretch of New Mexico sky.

Max settles back in his chair, hands crossed over his stomach. “I don’t know, I guess I just thought you must have liked living with them or something.”

He casts Max a look over his shoulder. “God, why?”

Max shrugs and keeps his eyes on the stars. “You were just pissed at me after that.”

Michael sighs. He bogarts the joint for another few puffs before kicking the leg of Max’s chair and passing it over. “Yeah,” he admits. “I was pissed.”

Max tips into that tone he uses when he’s right but wants to be a pest about it. “If I hadn’t shown up, we’d have all been screwed.”

Rolling his eyes, he can’t keep the edge of irritation from his voice when he drawls, “Yes, Max. Believe me, I know.”

“So—? What’s the problem? You didn’t like living with them. And they were exploiting you—”

“They were keeping me,” he blurts all at once. Thunking his head against the wooden back of the chair, Michael laments the fact that he apparently lost his brain-to-mouth filter half an hour ago. Without looking at Max, he extends his hand for the joint and refuses to speak until he’s burned the last of it down to the filter.

Flicking what’s left into the fire, he billows a cloud of smoke up towards the stratosphere.

“I was scared,” he finally confesses. His leg bounces with excess energy.

Max sits forward; even without looking at him, Michael can feel him staring.

“Of your foster dad?” Max asks.

He puffs a startled laugh that twists into a cough. “I mean, yeah. But, uh—no. I was scared the system would take me out of Roswell again.” He drums his fingers against his thigh. “Away from you and Iz. So. That’s why I was playing nice with the Peytons. Didn’t wanna risk it.”

“Oh,” Max mumbles, followed by another, clumsier. “Oh shit. I, uh—I wasn’t thinking about—”

Michael interrupts him with a wave of his hand. Tonight, he’s weightless and untouchable. The stars look closer than they ever have before. And for once, feeling small isn’t such a bad thing. Possibility crackles in the air like static electricity.

“Nah, it all worked out,” he sighs. He aims a wry smile into the dim stretch of desert before turning it on Max. “Not like we could’ve told ‘em I was an alien. At least now if I get disappeared and vivisected, Adam Peyton won’t be cashing any checks.” He pries a splinter of wood from the arm of the chair and sends it skittering through the dirt, like skipping stones on a dry pond.

“I get it,” Max murmurs, sounding cowed and uncomfortable the way he always does any time they dig too far into the past. “I’m sorry—”

“Evans, we have done this song and dance before,” Michael interrupts. He shoots him a sidelong glance. “I don’t need your apologies.” After a beat and a breath, he adds, “And—y’know. I’m grateful.” He cracks into his second beer before lifting the bottle in toast. “Pretty sure Christine would’ve started selling tickets next. So. Good timing.”

Max ducks a smile and clinks their beers together. “Wow, that ‘thank you’ was like pulling teeth for you, huh?”

With a snort, Michael jostles his shoulder. He can’t help the grin that elbows its way onto his face. “Yeah, well. Hope you were paying attention, ‘cause it’s the only one you’re getting.”

Max laughs—bright and contagious—and before he knows it, they’re both tittering into their drinks.

“I’m glad you stopped by,” Max says through the last of his laughter.

Michael grins at him. “Don’t get used to it.”

He lets himself into the Pony early in the evening, before the sun’s gone down. Maria’s the only one there, standing behind the bar counting the bills in the register. Without ever looking up at him, Maria singsongs, “Michael Guerin, you know you’re not allowed in my bar.”

Michael tucks his hands into his pockets and casts a pointed glance around the empty room, chairs still stacked on tables. Nodding, he meanders towards the counter. “I dunno, DeLuca. Pretty empty in here. You sure you can afford to be picky?”

Maria rolls her eyes. “We’re not open yet, smartass.”

He feigns innocence just to drive her a little crazy. “And how is that my fault?”

She squints at him. “I thought I locked that door.”

He grins. “Huh. Guess you didn’t.” (She did.)

A smile sneaks onto her face despite her very best efforts. “Alright, fine. I’ll make you a deal, Guerin. I’ll let you have one drink, if you pay for a reading.” She extends a hand palm up, waggling her fingers in invitation.

He clicks his teeth, swaying backwards away from the bar. “Nah, I don’t really do the whole psychic thing.”

Maria shrugs, entirely unbothered. “Your loss,” she hums, shooting a pointed glance at the wall of bottles behind her. “But that tequila you like costs a lot more than a palm reading.”

It startles a laugh out of him. “Alright, you got me.” He swings his leg over a bar stool and settles in front of her. Elbow on the counter, he extends his good hand. He grins. “So. How’m I gonna die?”

“Doesn’t work like that.” She regards him for a second before placing her own hand palm up, just to the side of his. “Now, give me the other one.”

Michael’s stomach twists. He hesitates and buries his gnarled hand deeper in his pocket. He forces a chuckle when he argues, “Uh, I’m pretty sure that’s gonna fuck up your reading.”

She raises her eyebrows. “And who’s the professional?”

Turns out, he has a hard time saying no to her. They lock eyes and he can already feel his resolve wavering. With a defeated sigh, he pulls his once broken hand from his pocket and lays it in hers.

His knuckles ache. They always do. But her fingers are warm and soft, and it turns out it’s been a while since he’s been touched like this—without malice or hunger, without an agenda. He swallows around a lump in his throat. She cradles his hand in both of hers and brings it closer to her face, tracing creases with her thumb.

“Well.” She glances up at him through her lashes. “You’re impulsive. Hot-headed.”

Michael wears a smile that isn’t half as acerbic as he means it to be. “Wow, you’re making a believer out of me,” he coos patronizingly.

She pinches the web between his thumb and forefinger.

“Hey!”

“Behave.” Maria returns her attention to his palm. Running her fingernail across the center, she singsongs, “Would you look at that, you’re a secret romantic. That’s cute.”

The fact that his heart steps up to double-time in his chest doesn’t mean that she’s right.

“This,” she trails her forefinger along the base of his hand, just above the wrist. “The way it splits here—it means you’re searching for something. Something bigger.” She follows the line down until it meets with another and feathers out and disappears. “Something far away.”

It catches his attention—makes him sit up and lean in.

“You don’t feel like you belong here.”

“C’mon,” he croaks, watching her more closely. “Anybody could’ve told you that.”

Maria shakes her head. “No, it’s different. It’s almost—well. I’d say sacred, but I know you’re not exactly devout. Spiritual? Divine?”

“Cosmic.”

He reminds himself to breathe. He reminds himself that this is just a parlor trick and a pretty girl messing with his head. But it doesn’t feel fake. Michael’s known plenty of conmen. Psychics, faith healers, conspiracy theorists, exorcists.

Maria DeLuca is a lot of things.

But she isn’t like them.

Mouth gone dry, it takes him a second to muster up the irreverence to breezily ask, “Anything else I should know about?”

She pulls his hand closer. “Well, you’ve got a short life line.”

The eerie, too-seen feeling starts to ebb, and he settles back in his seat. “So, I’m dying young, huh?”

“At this rate? Wouldn’t shock me.” She traces the line with her thumb, slow and purposeful. “That’s not what it means, though. It means you have a hard time trusting people, and you make your own choices.” She glances up, meeting his gaze. He feels suddenly hyperaware of the warmth of her skin against his. “Your future’s not written in stone, Guerin. And it’s not written on your hand, either. Not on either one of them.”

For a second, all Michael can do is stare. She holds his hand and his gaze—bold and bright and unwavering.

The moment breaks. Michael clears his throat and draws his hand back. “How, uh—um,” he swallows, struggling to right the suddenly off-kilter axis of his evening. He fumbles his wallet. “How much do I owe you?”

She watches him flounder for a second before reaching for the tequila she’d promised him. “You know what, Guerin? This one’s on the house.”

“For real?”

No sooner has she poured him his drink than she yanks it back out of his reach. “No. Ten bucks.” That wicked grin of hers looks gorgeous on her face.

He puffs out a dramatic sigh. “You drive a hard bargain, DeLuca.” Without argument, he empties out the cash he has on hand—which amounts to a crumpled mess of dollar bills and a fistful of change and probably falls a few bucks short of ten.

She accepts it without counting it. Whether it’s a misplaced act of trust or an unspoken gesture of kindness, he can’t be sure.

Maria scoots the drink into his hand and pours her own to toast. “To making our own destinies.”

He clinks them together. “To getting the fuck out of here.”

Maria smiles over the lip of her glass. “You like it here,” she chides knowingly.

“Yeah,” he murmurs with a private grin. “I guess I do.”