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Roles
Michael has never known what he's doing here on earth.
He looks around him, everyday, and he watches everybody. He used to watch the normal kids, the everyday kids, the kids he expected Liz and Maria and Alex to be. Kids like that chick who was in his maths class junior year, when he actually went. She has blond hair and big green eyes and she's kind of cute. But that wasn't what made him go to every single maths lesson in the second semester of his junior year. She sat in front of him, flanked on either side with two friends, another blond and a brunette, and they were always talking about what they'd done the night before. Like on Mondays, Main Blondie (that was what he called her, because he didn't need to know her name. He vaguely remembers it being emblazoned across her pink fluffy notebook, in sparkly glittery stickers, but he can't remember what it was, and he never tried to) would tell OtherBlond and Brownie that she'd kissed PJ Blackman or Gordon Smickley the night before and he was so cute and God, she hoped he didn't have a girlfriend. Then Otherblond and Brownie would giggle and deluge her with questions, about what he looked like and did she think he liked her. On weekdays she'd talk about what nail polish she'd tried on the night before and whether it was better than the Rimmel 60 seconds one (he'd actually picked that up from her) and whether it was smudged.
Michael had been fascinated by her. He'd watch her every single maths lesson, greedily drank in the snippets of conversation he strained to hear. He watched the way she picked up a pen, the way she wore her hair. He even, after a few weeks, recognised her socks and how often she wore certain ones. He'd gathered every single bit of information he could about her, wanting to know more and more – he'd even maneuvered it so that he sat nearby her in the cafeteria.
She'd seemed so – carefree. She didn't care that she was kind of stupid – maybe she didn't even know. She never talked about the future that Michael could hear, and he did listen quite a lot. She was never worried about her place on earth, whether she had a destiny, whether she was supposed to strive to be something better than what she was. She didn't think about who she was, beyond what hairstyle really said kiss me. She didn't care. She was who she was and she expected people to accept her for it, and to hell with those who didn't.
The obsession eventually died down. One day it was there and the next it had just faded away. He can remember when it faded away – it was the day after he let loose his powers on Hank, after he went to Maria for comfort and stability and acceptance. He can still picture her resolute face through the rain-soaked window pane, the steadiness and determination of her hand as she put some of that acrid Grief Relief stuff under her tongue – he snuck a look at her bag one day and recognised it.
He can remember that night clearly, almost too clearly sometimes, so much so that he wants to hide away and cringe in humiliation and the feeling of being so exposed. He remembers many things about that night, the way he almost felt like a normal kid – albeit a normal abused kid, but a normal kid, just another statistic. Funny, how it took the worst part about human life on this planet, being at the mercy of someone else, someone arbitrarily decided for you by the government, to make him feel like just another kid.
That's what Michael has always wanted. To not matter. To be another statistic. For his actions to be nothing more than something that can be forgotten at the drop of a coin. He knows Max and Isabel, maybe even Liz, although he includes her as an afterthought, an indifferent burden, think he wants to be the leader, with the way he took charge when Max died and he had that glowing seal on his chest and all his ruthlessness, but the truth is, he could care less about power, about ruling. What he wants is the certainty of it. He cannot stand, cannot stand on this halfway mark they've placed him on, never quite fitting in to earth because he can't, because he's an alien, and never quite reaching the destiny they say he has, because Max has given his up, and he knows his destiny is irrevocably linked with Max's. He will never be quite right in both worlds, never be another blip on a radar, because he's kind of important, just not important enough to matter.
So if he cannot fulfill his destiny and he cannot thrust it away completely, what is he doing here on earth? He is in limbo, he can move neither forward nor back.
But Maria helps. He knows the others do not fully know why he is drawn to her, why he loves her with whatever is left of his uncertain self to love. They think it has something to do with her emotional outbursts, the way she expresses the feelings he keeps tightly under control. They think it is because of lust, the effect she has on hormones which have never been too restrained anyway. They think many things, the others, and they are all partly correct.
He loves her because she diminishes him. She makes him feel fully human, fully like a man, a weak, fallible man. She does not care about his alien status, other than how it affects her and their relationship. She could care less about his second-in-command status. She makes him accountable for his actions, she expects him to be responsible and romantic and just a boyfriend. She doesn't ask more of him than that, that he be a good boyfriend.
So he tries. He tries to be the perfect boyfriend, and when he's doing that, when she's bollocking him for not being the best, not being more than BoyfriendMax, she makes him feel like another guy who can't please his girlfriend. She makes him into a stereotype. And then he feels like he knows what he's doing on this planet, he feels like nothing is important when everything can be as trivial as getting the perfect Valentine's day present.
And he doesn't have to think about destiny or the lack of it, and he can fade quietly away into Michael Guerin, boyfriend. And he loves her for it.