Pieces Want To Be Together

Chapter 14 Got A Brother to Find

So long, long time without an update. This story on Ao3 has changed a bit. I will make those same edits here, but for now a new chapter!

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It is a relief to be back in the mindscape, the home screen Isobel had built, a place of endless desert and a good sunset. It was short-lived, a span of time so short that it was gone before it really formed. In its place was numbness, a spreading hollow emptiness.

His face blank, Dallas sits down in the dirt as if he can't believe what he saw, collapsing to his knees and Isobel takes a minute to breathe, her face even here in this make-believe safe-space, is chalk white, her eyes fluttering with shock and grief.

Alex can't really think.

Isobel is probably shielding him from her pain. If he focuses, he can feel the edges of it. Like broken glass, a thing not shattered but broken so there are large pieces sticking out like knives and he's sure that Dallas is fully in shock. But Alex cannot focus on it for long, his attention slipping away.

Five minutes ago he had seen a Michael Guerin murdered, tortured and left to bleed out in a white chamber, the worst of the intelligence wet teams would be proud of. A sea of blood, days of agony and it was Michael. He then watched his Michael take on his father, nearly die and get shot by Flint all while trying to save Manes and another Dallas.

He went into another world with reckless abandon because Alex and Dallas were worth it. Instead of washing his hands of them, he took a massive risk and entered a world where he could have died. And he didn't care. He fought Noah. He got Jesse Manes killed and saved Manes and his brother using himself as a conduit.

Jesse might have died for it, but Michael, he used himself as the conduit. Then ended up fighting Noah in yet another world with AM, where he nearly died in a lonely desert if AM hadn't taken a chance, hadn't been driving by hoping for a fucking sign.

Blood. Red and pouring a wound that nearly killed him. Blood up the walls, drenching the floor, the smell of it cloying and horribly metallic, the smell of it an echo to other times and to what was done, the pain inflicted.

Michael.

There is a scream trapped in his throat, tears that will flood down his cheeks later. He'll go fully to pieces himself, the images scarred into his mind, no matter that his Michael got out of there.

His dad...Jesse Manes and Flint no doubt, tortured and murdered Michael.

Alex wanted to hit something, wanted to scream and cry. He can't keep it in. This is his head. His heart is breaking, his breathing turns to hyperventilating as the image of Michael....dead and tortured, hands shattered sears into his brain. He's deaf to Isobel and Dallas, as grief and horror consume him. His soul howls with the agony of it and he cannot stop spiraling.

The black out was almost a relief, if he had the time to feel it.

**

He wasn't aware of the seizure or the wall tumbling down in his mind separating Alex from AM. He wasn't aware of Kyle's attempts to stabilize him or Isobel trying to shore up his mind so he didn't descend maybe into madness, or Dallas trying to project calm so didn't have a heart attack.

No, all Alex knew was that he was drowning. In a sea of memories, many of which he knew were not his own, some of which were parallels or vastly difference from his lived experience. Michael's death haunted him, blending with the basement and the Shed, with war trauma and Kaiju.

In this moment, this block of time that felt eternal, AM and Alex were one.

Michael's chaos might have been a storm, a hurricane of thought, emotion and stored knowledge, but this for Alex is drowning in the darkest sea. Like the ocean when Michael pulled him...AM...him....from the wreckage of Painted Desert, he was adrift among thrashing steel blue waves.