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aperture
Rating: PG
Category: Michael/Isabel, hints of Michael/Maria
Summary: Michael lives in a world where beauty is dead.
Disclaimer: All characters and likenesses herein are the
sole property of Melinda Metz, Jason Katims, et al. It’s a long list,
and it doesn’t include me. Don’t sue.
Spoiler Warning: This fic begins 2nd season, right
after Cry Your Name, but it basically takes the entire Roswell
universe into a different direction from the one we all know. So if you know about Alex, you
can't be spoiled. If you
don't, turn back now. :)
The afternoon is starting to ghost away.
Camera. He needs to get started now, or he’ll lose the day.
Michael checks the shutter speed and sets the exposure time.
Double checks the fading sunlight; it looks about right. It’ll cast
shadows that will perfectly complement his choice of black and white film.
He always uses black and white.
Aim and shoot.
He looks for just the right angles with which to capture the image
before him. A breeze is blowing, rippling waves of tall grass around
the abandoned old car. Rust eats at its body, slowly tearing holes in
the bare metal, paint long since worn away by the elements.
Over and over, the camera’s shutter clicks. It is the only sound
besides mild breathing that comes from man or camera; all the others are
the muted sounds of nature. Sounds that belong there.
Michael reloads the camera.
He hasn’t touched a canvas since the moment he heard. He doesn’t
think about why, doesn’t analyze himself the way Max does, or Liz.
All his life has been about survival, and there’s so little time left over
for introspection.
Survival comes first. And, with the camera in his hands, he
continues to exist. That, after all, is what the word is all about –
enduring. Carrying on.
Living.
So he doesn’t think about it much. But sometimes, just sometimes,
he remembers.
“I need to borrow the car.”
Maria rolled her eyes as an exasperated sigh escaped her. She was
messy, disheveled from a long shift, and tired. Her uniform was
crumpled, and her silver apron bore a faint splotch, as if something had
splattered on it, only to be scraped absently and haphazardly away.
“Michael…”
Her annoyance was given life in the sound of his name. “What?”
“What do you mean, what?” she demanded wearily. “Why do you need
to hijack my car?”
He pursed his lips and frowned down at her, silent until the walk was
clear of passers-by. “Alien stuff.”
Her eyes rolled again, as if to say, whyever else? Then she
shook her head. “No dice, spaceboy. I just worked the shift
from hell, and all I care about is getting home and into the most
disgustingly luxurious bubble bath known to man.” With that, she
started away from him, toward the space that housed her mother’s aging
Jetta.
He went after her. “You don’t have to come. In fact, you
probably shouldn’t.”
“Of course,” she threw over her shoulder. “Too dangerous.”
Her tone was bored; she’d heard those particular words more than enough.
“Yeah,” he agreed shortly. “So…”
She continued to walk, then stopped by the car. “So what?”
He shifted impatiently, making an irritated sound. “So, give me
the keys already.”
Her green eyes widened. “Michael! Don’t you ever listen to
me? I said no. N. O. You know, the opposite of
yes?” She unlocked the door and opened it, yanking off her alien head
apron. With a flick of her wrist, it landed on the passenger seat of
the car. “Unless you dropped me off first, then brought the car back
before my mom got home…”
“There’s no time for that,” he argued. “I need the Jetta, and I
need it five minutes ago. You can stay here at Liz’s until I get
back.”
She stared at him for several heartbeats, then smiled mirthlessly and
shook her head. “You really are something, Michael. Look, take
me home, and you can have the car. Don’t take me home, and you can
walk wherever you’re going. Your choice.” That said, she
levered herself down onto the driver’s seat, sitting with her long legs
outside the car, sneakered feet resting on the cracked asphalt.
Michael ran his hands through his hair, then whirled around
dramatically. He hoped his theatrics would convince her to relinquish
the keys. Instead, he saw the door to the Crashdown swing open.
A tall figure stepped outside, a plastic cup of orange soda in one hand.
Michael smirked and turned back to Maria. “You can catch a ride
with Alex.”
Maria followed his gesture and saw her friend standing on the sidewalk,
casually sipping his soda through a straw. “Fine,” she groaned.
“Alex loves me. I’m sure he’ll take time out of his hectic schedule
to drive me home. Unlike some people I know.”
She climbed out of the car and crossed pale arms over her chest, pushing
her nametag up and out at an odd angle. It’s funny how he remembers
things like that. The way she smelled like rosewater and Saturn Rings
and ketchup. The way even her hair looked tired, hanging limply in a
ponytail, the ringlets of curls barely even visible.
The way she was beautiful beyond belief.
A sudden smile quirked her lips, and she tossed the keys at him.
He fumbled to catch them, and she laughed lightly. “You owe me for
this,” she warned, gliding past him. The she was jogging down the
walkway. “Hey, Alex! Wait up!”
He didn’t watch her go.
Half the time, he wishes that he had. The other half he spends on
wishes that he’d never met her, never become a part of her life.
Never hurt her.
Never killed her.
He doesn’t think while he readies the exposures for developing. He
does nothing fancy, just prepares the paper for straight exposure. He
will save the burning and dodging, all the special procedures, for after
the first round, when he sees what the prints look like. Where they
need to be brighter, or darker.
It’s mindless work, but painstaking, though he really doesn’t have to do
it at all. There are machines for this, the kind used by most retail
developers and many photography printers. But Michael prefers to go
through this step himself, squaring off each frame in the enlarger with
precision and skill. Not because he doesn’t trust technology, or
because he particularly wants to.
Most of the time, he doesn’t think while he does it.
That’s why he does it.
He doesn’t remember what alien mission was so dire and important at the
time, but he knows that he was late getting the Jetta back to Maria’s, and
he was certain that her mother would already be home, would level on him
the glare he’d become used to.
You’re not good enough for my baby girl.
She knew it, and so did he, and so he didn’t blame her for it. He
silently and secretly applauded Amy DeLuca for her good sense. It was
something her daughter didn’t seem to share.
She should have been home, but the lights weren’t on, and no one
answered the door. He collected Maria’s apron from the seat of the
car, carefully locked it, and began to walk back to the Crashdown.
When he saw the “Closed” sign at nine-thirty, he knew something wasn’t
right.
He sprinted the few blocks between the café and the Valenti
residence. It was closest, and the Sheriff or Tess would know what
had happened.
Kyle answered the door.
He slides a seemingly blank, empty sheet into a shallow dish of
chemicals. Bathed in muted red light, he watches as an image slowly
emerges. At first, it’s just a vague shadow, the outline of shapes
and shades. Over time, it clears, solidifies.
Kyle asked him in, his eyes straying oddly, tellingly, to the gaudy
silver fabric clutched in Michael’s hand.
Kyle asked him in, and the sound of his voice scared the living hell out
of him, because Kyle had never used that tone of voice when speaking to
him. Would never.
He didn’t go in. “What happened?” and it didn’t even sound like
his own voice as he stood under the glaringly bright porch light on the
front step. Stood and waited.
To his credit, Kyle wasn’t melodramatic about it. He just said it
calmly, matter-of-factly, albeit with that same sad, compassionate timbre.
“There was an accident, Michael. Alex and Maria.”
Out of the developing solution and into the water. A smooth slide,
with none of the clumsy splashes he made when he first started. His
movements are practiced, easy.
He grasps the edge of the paper and swirls it lightly, then waits.
Michael no longer needs to time the processes, count off the seconds as
they tick past. Instinct and habit tell him how long to leave the
paper in the tanks.
Or maybe he’s just become accustomed to noticing time.
He slips the photograph into the fixative.
Michael doesn’t remember the drive to the hospital, just the smell of it
once they arrived. He’s always hated the unnatural way hospital
corridors reek of disinfectant and latex. He remembers how Kyle
seemed to know exactly where to go, and how Sheriff Valenti had his hat in
one hand. How he could hear muffled sobs drifting from the open
doorway behind the Sheriff.
How Liz’s head was buried in the crook of Max’s neck. How her
impossibly tiny, thin shoulders shook.
Max’s eyes when he looked up. Red-rimmed, swollen. They
widened, then filled with tears. And then, from nowhere, Kyle was
pulling him toward Max, was taking Michael’s hand and holding it out,
showing Max the angry, weeping blisters and the skin that had patches of
melted silver polyester burned into it.
Michael watched detachedly as Max held a shaking hand to his, healed
him, and he remembers that he shuddered, because Max shouldn’t have healed
him.
He should have hurt.
He wanted to hurt.
He watched as Isabel walked out of the room, how her eyes locked on
him. Unseeing. Blank. His own numb feelings of nothing
reflected on Isabel’s beautiful features.
She looked the way he felt, except that her slack, placid face was
tracked with tears, tears that still flowed from her vacant eyes.
He moved forward, past them all, around the edge of the doorway and into
a room filled with cheap vinyl-covered chairs and anguish. Maria’s
mother was wrapped in Mrs. Evans’s arms, wailing and screaming.
“Maria… Maria, no, please… No!”
But Michael could see her face, her quivering mouth, and it was like
watching a badly-dubbed foreign movie, because the pleading cries didn’t
match how her lips moved.
“Maria!”
He hit the floor, felt hands reaching for him, shrugged them off.
He was fine. He was fine, but Maria was dead.
It was only then that he realized the shrieks were his.
He begins to fastidiously rotate prints through the process of
developing, rinsing, fixing. He moves automatically, always
wary. If he leaves the paper in one or another of the tanks for too
long, it will ruin it.
Soon, Michael has a line of wet, dripping photographs clipped to the
drying wire. He eyes them critically, tilting his head from one side
to the other. Looking for the ones that are good, and the ones that
might be excellent. Breathtaking.
But he won’t know for certain until they’re dry, so he moves back to the
enlarger to prepare more negatives. His last one, which was really
the first in the camera, is of Isabel.
She adores having her picture taken, though she’d kill him if she knew
he took this one. In it, she’s asleep, her mouth hanging partially
open, hair tangled and mingling with the early morning light as both fall
obliquely over her face, eclipsing most of her skin. Her shoulder is
almost bare, luminescent, the edge of a sheet skating across it.
She would hate this one because she is open, exposed. She isn’t
playing the princess, graciously and skillfully charming her subjects with
her practiced smile and effortless good looks.
She’s just a woman asleep.
She would hate that; it’s been a long time since she was anything but
the princess. It’s a façade she treasures, because it has become who
she is.
For a long time after the funerals, Michael didn’t really associate with
the others. They were forever stopping by, calling, trying to
reassure themselves that he was all right. That he was coping.
He always told them what they needed to hear, but he wanted nothing to
do with them. The day after Maria was put in the ground, he saw Max
talking to Liz, saw them smile at each other. Miserable, cheerless
smiles, but smiles.
How long would it be before laughter followed? And what kind of
person could laugh in a world where there was no Maria?
The only one he could stomach the sight of was Isabel, mostly because
she had turned into an actress, and the entire world was her stage.
Her smiles were bright and cold, the false color in her cheeks perpetually
vivid. Her eyes were the only true part of her; they held nothing, which
was exactly what Michael wanted to see.
Nothing.
It made him feel like there was someone else in the world like him.
It wasn’t long before they began to take comfort in each other’s misery,
sharing silence but nothing else. Isabel probably would have spoken of
Alex if Michael had given her the chance, but he refused. He knew
that, if he did, she would expect him to do the same.
That wasn’t going to happen. His memories of Maria were his, and
his alone. If he shared them, then he was giving away the only thing
he had left besides a butterfly-shaped hair clip and a scorched,
half-melted apron.
The picture of Isabel is the best one.
Sometimes, it makes him feel almost normal again, the fact that he can
still find splendor in a dead world. It’s something he can’t find
within himself anymore, can’t render with chalk or pencil or
watercolors. But out there, in the world, his camera can catch
glimpses.
Months passed before isolation overcame them both, before Isabel reached
out to touch him one night on his couch. He wasn’t the one who would
instigate it, and they both knew it.
So she did.
He didn’t care that she cried afterwards, that she apologized and pushed
him away and explained in choked, agonized whispers that she missed Alex so
much she thought she might die.
He didn’t care because, if stoic silence hadn’t been Michael Guerin’s
best friend, he might have done the same thing.
Instead, he held her. And he touched her again. Somehow,
they both understood what it meant.
And what it didn’t mean.
He makes copies of Isabel’s picture, experiments with exposure
time. Makes the print lighter, darker, toys with the idea of
hand-tinting it. A sepia tone, or maybe the lightest, barest shade of
blue or lavender…
He works into the evening, but he doesn’t realize it, because the
darkroom has no windows, no way to gauge the passage of day into night.
Max once asked him why he was with Isabel. Michael thought that he
should be able to answer, but he couldn’t. There was no real reason,
just the solace and consolation they shared.
He knew Max wouldn’t think it enough.
Isabel once asked him if he felt anything anymore. It was after
they’d moved in together, during one of their rare fights, when she was
starting to suspect that life might hold something for her other than him.
“Don’t you want to be happy, Michael? Huh? Don’t you ever
even think about it?” she queried hotly.
He laughed then, because he honestly didn’t.
It enraged Isabel, and she threw a vase at his head, breaking it against
the wall, splattering water and lilies everywhere. “You’re dead,
Michael. Dead. You may be breathing, but there’s nothing
left inside you at all.”
And she was right. That was the difference between them, he
supposed; she was still just acting, playing calm and serene when,
underneath it all, she still experienced every emotion she always had.
Michael didn’t. Anger was the only thing he could fathom, and that
was gone; his fury at himself for being such a heartless, wretched dick had
long ago burned away, taking his misery, faith, and compassion with
it. And love and hope were both in a town he never wanted to see
again, under six feet of dusty red clay covered over with grass and flowers
and granite.
He had nothing left inside himself.
“You’re right,” he said, and turned to go.
She stopped him at the door. She always did.
The condo is in shadow when he leaves the darkroom, dim except for the
city lights streaming through the curtained windows. Michael flips a
switch, flooding the kitchen with illumination. He tosses the latest
photo of Isabel on the table, and it slides a bit on the polished wood.
He is staring at it when she comes in, keys jangling, calling his name.
“In here,” he says, his voice only slightly raised.
She enters the kitchen, paper bags in hand. “Have you eaten
yet? I got Thai food for dinner.” She puts it on the counter
and moves to stand behind him.
“I don’t think so,” he murmurs absently, still staring at the photo as
she runs a hand through the short hair at the back of his neck. “I
can’t remember.”
“You’ve probably been in the darkroom all day.” A hint of vexation
bathes the words. “What’s that?”
She leans closer, over his shoulder, and he tilts his head away from the
fall of her hair, hair that always smells of expensive shampoo and the best
crème rinses. “I took it this morning.”
“Oh, Michael.” Now it’s turned to annoyance, and she stalks to the
counter and begins to unpack cartons of food. “You know I hate it
when you do that. At least let me be awake and dressed when you take
those damn pictures. I look awful.”
Earlier, Michael looked at it and saw exquisiteness.
He still does.
“You don’t like it?” The inquiry is more habit than anything else,
and he looks at her, wanting to see her face when she says she
doesn’t. He’s used to that.
As expected, Isabel’s face screws up into a grimace. “It doesn’t
even look like me.”
There’s something in her intonation, a chill that barely touches
Michael. And he knows what she thinks, what she’s noticed.
He noticed it, too.
It looks almost like…
“Are you going to eat?” The frostiness has an edge now, one that
could cut Michael, if he bothered to be concerned.
His eyes focus on the photo once more. “I’m not hungry. I
think I’m going to take a walk.”
He doesn’t stay to watch her glare at him, to hear her mutter under her
breath about his aloof, detached existence. He can’t feel her
ire. All he feels is smooth metal and wood under his hands as he
opens, then closes the front door.
There’s magnificence in the world. Michael has found some of it
through the lens of his camera, captured it. He can admire it for its
pure aesthetic value, but there is nothing that he treasures. Nothing
he holds dear.
Nothing that can move him.
Isabel was right all those years ago. For all intents and
purposes, he’s dead. An empty soul inside a body that still moves,
talks, sleeps.
A body that still, in his weakest moments, wants.
But nothing can move him.
Not anymore.
end
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