Title: In Media Vita
Author: hauntedd
Rating: M
Disclaimer: These characters are not mine & are the property of Jason Katims/Melinda Metz
Summary: In Media Vita – In the midst of life.
AN: Based on a challenge by killjoy that was slightly tweaked with his consent. This was done for insidiousheart who won me at the first Support Stacie auction. I've also never really done Candy before (I'm a Mental Vibrator/Polarist), so there's that too haha.


Prologue

Dawn breaks on the horizon and he finds himself rubbing his dirt-streaked hands against his skin, a futile act to escape the advent of another day. With a grunt, he rises from the dry grass, unruly and far too brown for this time of year and stretches. His muscles burn and he takes note, not that it matters, really, there's no rest for a man on the run.

Turning on his heel, he takes his meager belongings in his hands and heads toward the brook he saw last night and scowls – it looked a whole lot better in the dark. He can't complain, though, at least there's something to wash his clothes in – he's had to do it all the old fashioned way since that guy in Marathon, half crazy and nearly dead, told him how to make everything out of nothing.

"It exists in lines, you find the right one and cut it – then it all goes the way it should've. Cut the wrong one and it all goes to shit."

He figures even shit is better than this. But he tries not to dwell on it – fucks with the mission, and he needs a one-track mind.

Dipping his pants in the water he catches a glimpse of his reflection and finds a stranger looking back. It's fitting since he's become somewhat of a ghost since leaving home, years before, his only family long gone. But despite the tanned skin and weary gaze, he still knows his name – Michael Guerin – and with it comes the fact that he's a modern day Ulysses whose odyssey will only end in tragedy since the closest he had to both Laertes and Penelope died along the way.

He doesn't like to think about it, because thinking leads to wishing, and like his foster father liked to say after a bit of moonshine, you can wish in one hand and shit in the other and then see what gets filled first.

It was the only bit of sage advice the drunk had ever given him. Hank's lessons tended to be far more physical than cerebral, and Michael has the scars to prove it.

But memories of three bullets and final acts of derring-do come anyway. It seems that no matter how fast or far he runs, a part of him remains in the hills of Pennsylvania with the specks of dust that carried off into the wind when the bodies failed to hold their form.

"Run!"

"I… No."

"It's too late… you have to... I… they can't get all of us, I won't let them."

"No, I can't, we need to fight. We can heal this."

"Damn it Michael, let me be the hero for once."

Staring out at the expanse of desert, he reaches into his battered backpack, the frayed straps of the black L.L. Bean held together by a few metal safety pins, and grabbed the dog-eared Rand McNally from one of the pockets. Extracting a pen from between the pages, Michael slips his bare feet into the stream and eyes the maps carefully as his jeans dry next to him.

"I'm in fucking New Mexico," he groans as he realizes he's about 40 minutes outside of Santa Fe. At least it's upstate, he reasons, and figures he can get a job as a day laborer to pay the bills until he can get out to Los Angeles – he's down to his last twenty dollars and knows that's not going to be enough. The irony of coming full circle isn't lost on him – though anyone he knew is long gone and he's not going back to Roswell. Not when he knows there's nothing there but the shadows of nightmares lingering in corners of places once familiar.

Clawing an eyebrow, Michael formulates a plan while washing his t-shirt, leaving his chest, defined and muscular through hundreds of these temporary lives, exposed to the morning sun, now higher than before.

It was easier even two years ago, when he was twenty-four and one of three, not an army of one. When it was common to turn a dollar into a hundred and the van had yet to meet the ditch that did it in. Now, it's different and his time as a vagrant has taught him that while he trusts himself, most of the time, he shouldn't waste his last twenty on a gamble.

Michael knows that he needs a job and the only way that he'll get one is by leaving the solitude for the city – he knows he can't pass for ilegal – but no one's ever asked questions before, and they deal in cash, which is the only way he can continue to remain on the periphery of society.

So he throws his clothes back on with militaristic precision and kicks the dirt off of his shoes, intent on getting to the city before last pickup. Missions require action and plot needs filler and he's ready for another chapter on the way to the beginning after the end.