Disclaimer: I own none of the characters portrayed in this story.
Summary: Tag to "Departure." A few days after the events of that episode, a broken Kyle goes to Maria for comfort.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Up to and including "Departure."
Feedback: Sure! I love the nice kind! :)
Distribution: Feel free to take it!
Notes: This is not a Second Generation (Maria/Kyle) romance fic; it's about friendship. I think it's undeniable that when Maria and Kyle are onscreen together, there's a lot of wonderful chemistry there. Since she's my favorite girl on the show, and he's my second favorite guy, I have no problem dedicating a fic to their friendship. My Michael/Kyle friendship obsession is no secret; this is simply another aspect of that. :)
Dedication: To Jen, who joins me in my Kyle-adoration week after week. "OMG, Michael was SOOOO gorgeous in this eppy! AND KYLE! WOW!!" LOL! That's how most of our convos go. ;)
Muse-ic: Oldie Goldies! Cause they rock!
********
"If I could tell the world just one thing
it would be that we're all okay.
Not to worry, cause worry is wasteful,
And useless in times like these."
-Jewel
"Hands"
********
When the knocking started on Maria Deluca's bedroom window at two in the morning, she was certain it could only be one person. Who else but her mussy-haired boyfriend would come tip-tap-tapping on her window in the middle of the night? So when she got out of bed and sauntered over to the window, she deliberately put an extra sway in her hips, and made sure her camisole was falling off one shoulder.
She couldn't have been more surprised when, instead of the angular face of Michael Guerin, she was met with the pale, rounder features of Kyle Valenti.
"Kyle?" she asked, surprised, as she opened her window and tugged her spaghetti strap up onto her shoulder again. "What are you doing here?"
"Can I come in?" he asked, his voice eerily flat.
Maria nodded, immediately concerned. "Yeah, sure. Come on." She stood out of the way and let him clamber in onto her window seat. Her mother would have serious issues with her letting boys into her room in the middle of the night-- Michael could attest to that-- but Maria didn't like the pallid nature of Kyle's skin, or the dead look in his eyes.
Dead. That was it. He looked dead.
"What are you doing here?" she asked, closing the window and walking to where he now stood, in front of her vanity mirror.
"I just...I had to get out of that house, you know?" Kyle murmured, fingering her assortment of combs.
Maria nodded slowly. "Yeah. I...suppose I can imagine."
Kyle shook his head. "No you can't." He picked up one of her combs and started turning it over and over again in his hands. "Tess had one like this."
Maria forced herself not to wince at that name. "It's a pretty common brand."
"I had to clean all her stuff out of my room yesterday," he continued, as if she hadn't even spoken. "Dad and I just loaded it into trash bags and dumped it all at the Salvation Army." He shuddered and walked away from Maria's vanity to sit on the edge of her bed, still playing with the comb.
"That must have been really hard," Maria said quietly, leaning on her vanity and watching him. "You could have asked for help."
Kyle shook his head quickly at that, watching the comb make tesseract motions between his fingers. "No."
"You and your dad shouldn't have had to do that alone, Kyle. We all would have helped."
He shook his head again. "No. It...It was my fault."
Maria looked at him curiously. "Your fault? What are you talking about?"
Kyle's voice was still flat when he spoke, but it was quieter than ever. "I got Alex killed."
Maria's eyes widened. "You got.... Kyle, you can't believe that!"
He didn't respond, but the comb in his hands stilled.
She walked towards the bed quickly and knelt in front of him. "Kyle, what happened... Alex dying was NOT your fault, okay?" she told him firmly, trying to look into his eyes. She had to tilt his chin up to do it properly. "You didn't know what was happening. You were as much a victim as Alex."
Kyle shook his head morosely. "I was bigger than her. I could have grabbed her, pulled her away, before she could do anything. I could have gotten Alex out of there somehow."
"Kyle, Tess didn't have to be near Alex to mindwarp him. She would have done it anyway."
"I still could have TRIED. Maybe distance...if he was farther away, maybe it wouldn't have hurt him so badly... He might have lived..." His voice was rising in pitch, losing it's flat quality and growing more frantic.
"Kyle, Kyle, shhhhh!" Maria soothed, taking his face between her palms and running her thumbs over his cheekbones. "Shhhhh.... It's okay."
"No. No it's NOT!" He stood up, pushing her back a little, and started pacing back and forth across her bedroom floor. "I should...have been able to do SOMETHING! He was my FRIEND!"
Maria nodded slowly, but didn't get up off the floor. "And Tess was virtually your sister."
He stopped pacing at that, and stood staring at the floor.
"If I had been there, Kyle," she murmured softly, "and if I'd been in your position, I wouldn't have known what to do either." She shook her head. "It's not your fault."
The athletic young man stood there for a few seconds, unresponsive. When he finally looked up, her breath caught in her throat when she saw he was crying.
"She made me carry his body, Maria," he whispered hoarsely, tears on his cheeks. "Made...made me DRAG him, like he was frigging LUGGAGE."
A hot lump started burning in Maria's throat, and she stood up. "Kyle...."
"What if he was still alive, Maria?" he continued, eyes glued to hers. "What if some part of him saw what I was doing? " He closed his eyes and she saw his Adam's apple bob as he swallowed, obviously trying to fight back a sob. "God, he must hate me..."
The burning behind Maria's eyes exploded then, and she felt the tears that had been brimming spill over to roll down her cheeks, "Oh, God, Kyle..." she murmured, walking to him and wrapping her arms around his neck tightly. She felt his muscular arms twine around her waist as he hugged her in return.
"Kyle, Alex doesn't hate you," she whispered roughly, stroking his hair as he pressed his forehead into her shoulder. Hot tears rolled down her arm and under her shirt, but she closed her eyes and ignored them. "He knows how much you miss him."
"I...I just threw him into the car!" Kyle sobbed against her. "Oh, God, what if I made him bleed? What if....s..some of that blood....I caused!"
What could she say to that? What could she say at ALL?
"Kyle....I don't know what to tell you, Kyle," Maria murmured, holding him close. She tried to fight back her own tears, but it wasn't working. "Only that Alex would never hate you. Alex was...the most loyal, most devoted friend in the world." She rubbed her cheek on Kyle's shoulder. "He knows you would never hurt him deliberately. He knows that. He's watching you right now and...and its probably driving him crazy that he can't just make a joke and help you stop hurting. "
He hugged her tighter. "Y...you think?"
She nodded quickly, one hand still smoothing his hair as the other rubbed his back. "I'm sure. He'd say something like...like, 'Wow. I think you've spilled more water than Hoover Dam.'"
Kyle laughed a little through his tears. "Y..yeah... Or he'd make some...crack about d..dodgeball."
Maria smiled, wiping away some of her own tears. "Yeah,"she murmured, still holding him. "Good ole dodgeball."
"The sport of champions," Kyle chuckled, sniffling.
"That's what Alex used to claim," Maria agreed, her embrace loosening as they reminisced.
"I miss him, Maria," he whispered, rubbing her back.
"Me too," she whispered back. "And I bet he's saying the same thing about us."
**********
A short time later, Maria and Kyle were laying side by side on her bed, looking up at the ceiling and swapping stories. To Maria, it felt like sixth grade all over again.
"Oh, God, remember that time he tried to ask Isabel to 70's night at the Flying Pepperoni, and went to her house in bellbottoms and an afro wig?" Maria asked.
Kyle laughed out loud. "And she said she wouldn't be caught dead in polyester."
Maria nodded, grinning. "He was blushing for a week after that! And Isabel said it looked cute on him, which made it last even longer."
Kyle shook his head, chuckling. "The things he'd do to impress her. I kept telling him, play it cool. But he wouldn't listen to me!"
Maria sighed and closed her eyes. "Whatever he did, it worked, in the end. She was head over heels for him."
She heard him sigh as well. "Yeah. This...had to have been really tough on her. Finding out...you know, about the whole Tess thing."
Maria nodded. "I still... God, I still can't believe it. Tess."
Kyle was silent beside her, so she tilted her head to the side and opened her eyes to look at him. He was staring, stony-faced, at the ceiling above them. "You okay?" she asked.
He glanced at her and nodded, smiling a little. "Yeah. Just...thinking about my mom." He looked up at the ceiling again.
Maria propped herself up on her elbow. "Wanna talk about it?"
He shrugged. "She made the BEST potatoes au gratin. With bacon on the bottom? Dad said she even won a blue ribbon at one of the town cook offs back when they still had those every year." He shook his head. "I remember how they tasted."
Maria nodded, letting him talk.
"It was so weird, because when Tess came along....She made them perfect. Like, she'd found my mother's recipe book or something and followed it, word for word. But...my mom didn't HAVE a recipe book. If she did, she took it with her when she left." He ran his hand over his eyes, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "I don't know how she did it...but when Tess was there, she filled something that'd been missing, you know? Some weird hole that Dad and I didn't really notice anymore."
"She was like a mom to you two," Maria prompted gently.
Kyle sighed, and nodded. "Yeah, I guess that's it." He looked up at her, eyes a little lost. "Is it sick of me to say I miss her?"
Maria thought for a second, and shook her head. "No. It's not." She reached out to stroke his hair. "I don't think Tess was evil. I mean, I hate her because she killed Alex. I hate her for that. But I...I believed her when she said it was an accident." She closed her eyes and let her head hang forward. "I think she was just...obsessed. It blinded her to everything else."
"I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to feel," Kyle murmured. "Half of me wants to follow her back to her planet and break her neck. The other half of me wants to hug her and....and ask her to make more potatoes."
Maria sniffled, and opened her eyes again, blinking away tears. "Hating someone has never been a good idea, in the grand scheme of things," she murmured, rubbing his shoulder. "I say go with option two. In the end, I think that was the REAL Tess. The other one... she was created forty years ago, before she even got to be born." She sighed. "I can't hate the real Tess. But I can hate what she had to become."
Kyle nodded. "Yeah." He sighed and crossed an arm over his eyes. "God, I wish my mom were around. Besides her potatoes...she gave the best hugs."
Maria watched him quietly for a few seconds, then leaned forward and curled her arms around him.
He pulled his arm away from his eyes. "Wha-?"
But she cut him off. "Shhh, shut up." She hugged him tightly. "When you live with just a mom for most of your life, you learn a lot of mom-ish things. Like how to hug." She rubbed his arm gently.
Kyle lay stiffly beneath her for a few seconds, then slowly, she felt his muscles start to loosen. After a few seconds, he curled up against her side and wrapped his arms around her, his head on her shoulder.
"You...you won't tell anyone, right?" he asked quietly as she rubbed his back.
Maria smiled. "I promise."
Kyle nodded, seemingly satisfied, and let her hold him.
She rocked him gently, still rubbing his back, and hummed a quiet, imaginary melody. It didn't take long before the athlete, emotionally exhausted, fell asleep.
Maria continued rubbing his back for a few minutes, gazing up at the ceiling. She smiled.
"Goodnight, Alex," she whispered, and closed her eyes, resting her cheek on Kyle's hair. "I miss you."
A few minutes later, she too, was asleep, and didn't feel the soft breeze that floated across her legs, despite the fact that her window was closed.
************
LATER THAT NIGHT....
A shadowy figure crept into Maria Deluca's bedroom. He knew he had every right to do this, since she'd left her window unlocked for him for the past couple of nights.
Tonight was different, however. Because instead of finding the slim girl alone and waiting for him in her bed, he found that she already had a gentleman caller. And they looked far too friendly together to be "just friends."
A hot anger washed over Michael Guerin as he looked at the bundle of arms and legs that were his Maria and Kyle Valenti. How could she do this to him? After everything they'd been through; all he'd done for her?
He was debating whether he should just leave and give her the cold shoulder for the next week until he finally decided to confront her, or just walk over and tear them apart bodily, when Kyle shifted in his sleep.
Michael froze, watching with curious anger as Maria also moved, and mumbled something incoherent. Her hand started gently rubbing the athlete's back, until Kyle was still again. A few moments later, Maria, too, was motionless.
Michael cocked his head. Small nuances of their position were beginning to work into his anger soaked brain. The way she seemed to be cradling the muscular young man; how his head was resting just so on her shoulder. These weren't the positions of a pair of lovers.
It was like a mother and her child.
Slowly, quietly, Michael slipped out of his jacket and pushed off his shoes. Deftly, he climbed up onto the bed behind Maria and pressed against her back.
She mumbled something, and opened her eyes, looking over her shoulder at him. Her eyes widened. "Michael?" she murmured, waking up a little more. "Michael, it's not what-"
"Shhh," Michael murmured, stroking her arm. "I know it's not."
She relaxed a little, resting back against his chest. "Kyle...he was really broken up," she whispered. "He just...needed a hug."
"I know how that is," Michael whispered back, kissing the back of her neck.
He heard her sigh happily. "Thank you for understanding."
"Shhhh, go back to sleep," he murmured, settling down on the pillows behind her.
Maria nodded and rested her head down again. Michael watched her shoulders quickly go back to a steady rise and fall as she drifted off to sleep.
So Kyle needed a hug, huh?
"Yeah, I know all about that," he murmured to himself, wrapping an arm around Maria's waist. "He came to the right place."
He stayed like that for a few seconds. Then, tentatively, he stretched his arm a little farther and rested his hand on Kyle's elbow. Smiling, he closed his eyes and buried his face in Maria's hair, letting her scent lull him to sleep, and hoping Kyle would be the first one to feel Amy's newspaper when the morning rolled around.
THE END