When Michael goes missing, while Alex is finishing shutting down Project Shepard, they discover another world and entirely different alien problem, as the Pod Squad fights to get their Guerin back .
Set during season 3. A crossover story between P...
The drive to the hospital was a blur and Alex took a second, sitting in the front seat of Isobel's car, to be grateful he wasn't driving.
His mind had disconnected from reality, not completely, but enough to render all emotion and sensation into a muted quiet, a simmering ocean of feeling covered temporarily by a layer of ice.
Because in high stress situations, Alex's mind turned scarily calm, a winter storm bringing with it a frigid world of decisions, plan-making and survival based dissociation. This he had learned young and it had served him well in combat, honed like a knife edge to be utterly focused on the mission, granting him complete emotional control.
But that ice was barely formed today.
When pain crossed too many thresholds, learned from his father's fists well before covert missions, Alex sometimes disappeared from reality. Slipping through cracks in the foundations of his awareness to sink into the dark, a place without sensation, somewhere where pain couldn't hurt him, where the betrayal of his father's hate and violence couldn't destroy him.
That complete dissociation had happened various times and in the half-life version of it, the empty place as he called it, Alex had pulled off missions, saved lives and driven down a highway without a single incident.
He had walked to school once with dislocated fingers and cracked ribs, never noticing traffic or the snow gathering around his boots. Only when Kyle had roughly shouldered him in the hallway, did he even realize where he was and the fact he was missing half his textbooks, amid the taunts and gibes.
....He remembered how sixteen year old Michael Guerin had loaned him three books that day, proffered in the hallway with barely a word, just a soft, 'if you need them.' complete with shrug, before going on his way, vanishing as he usually had into the crowd, his caramel curls bouncing ever so slightly.
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....Leaving Alex to watch him go, there in the hall with his bag open, three books in his hands, feeling grateful beyond words and a little stunned that his crush had a.) spoken to him in that drawl, fueling every dream for weeks afterwards b.) given him his books and c.) saved his bacon so smoothly, right when he needed it the most.
All day in class, he had used those books, touched the pages, a little giddy at the thought of them belonging to Michael. He was so gone on him, even then.
Michael had probably memorized the contents already, he thought later, but after that moment in the hall, his total crush on the other boy had only gotten worse. Especially when he had tried to return them and Michael, leaning against the wall outside like he was Kurt Cobain, had just shrugged and said, 'everyone has bad days. You had them if you needed them.' He had no idea he had entranced Alex even more with his shutdown of any thanks or recompense.
He wondered what Kyle would have thought, if he had realized that Alex had been fantasizing about a curly-haired misfit with the prettiest eyes on the planet and all that defiant brilliance packaged into a lean, rangy, incredibly hot body. Not a jock. Not someone like Kyle. Not a guy on the cover of a magazine or even a rock star. Michael Guerin, in his grunge scene clothes and studied nonchalance.
