Disclaimer: Roswell, its characters and situations, are owned by the WB. No infringement intended.

Author's Note: This story is the part of an evolving future storyline. All the stories currently in this storyline are included in order on the Future Arc page.

An Epilogue to "Being Meant"

Three days after the shooting in the Crashdown Café, Michael Guerin found himself holding a dead man’s hand and regretting for the hundredth time that he had ever agreed to Alex’s stupid blackmail in the first place. If he hadn’t promised otherwise, he could have casually rubbed his thumb over that irritating nine of diamonds in his hand and turned it into an eight of diamonds, thus transforming his boring two-pair into a full house that would have beaten the flush he suspected Max was holding. But "no Czechoslovakian hocus-pocus" (in those words) was the one groundrule of their weekly card games that Alex and Kyle insisted was sacrosanct. So, whether he liked it or not, Michael was stuck with his appropriately named dead man’s hand.

Staring at his cards, all Michael could think about was how completely typical this whole situation was.

Even though Max didn’t care one iota about winning, he won their card games every week. And it wasn’t that he used his powers to win either. Max never even seemed tempted to use his powers in their card games ... unless it was to lose on purpose, which he’d been known to do. Michael suspected that Max didn’t even need to use his powers to win week in, week out. His winning effortlessly and constantly was just ... typical. It was like one of those mundane certainties on which reality hinged, like the mail’s arriving with regularity every morning except Sunday, and taxes being due without reprieve every April. In a way, Max’s winning all the time was almost, but not quite, comforting.

It was also sometimes, but not always, annoying as hell.

For some obscure reason, Max’s winningness didn’t seem to bother Alex. And Kyle had all these weird feelings of guilt mixed up with gratitude towards Max, so he pretended it didn’t bother him either. But it bothered Michael. A lot. The way he saw it, he’d spent enough of his life being second banana to Max; why did he have to be second banana when it came to stupid card games too?

It was just so typical. And, given their stupid groundrule, there was only one thing he could do about it. Scraping his chair back from Max and Liz’s dining room table, Michael stood up and declared, "I fold. I’m going to get something to drink. Anyone want anything?"

A couple of minutes later, Michael was rummaging through Max and Liz’s refrigerator for a can of cherry cola and reflecting on his second banana-ness, when he heard Max ask:

"Whoa. Where are you going?"

"Nowhere," a young voice replied. As he shut the fridge door, Michael noted that the voice sounded more than a little defensive. Although Max’s son Josh was a minor copy of Max, filled with the same rash courage and passionate empathy that had landed him in a déjà vu, nearly disastrous situation at the Crashdown three days ago, there were still differences between father and son, and that tiny bit of defensiveness in Josh’s voice proved it.

"Well, if you’re not going anywhere," Michael heard Max say; "why don’t you come play cards with us? Kyle had to leave early, so we could use a fourth."

"I wanted to get some air," Josh hedged. "And I kind of have a lot on my mind."

"I know," Max said, and Michael could easily imagine Max giving Josh one of those gentle, sympathetic looks that still drove Michael insane. "That’s why I thought you might enjoy a good card game."

Michael heard Josh laugh. "Dad. I hate to break this to you, but playing cards isn’t fun when you lose all the time. You and Uncle Michael kill everyone in the family at poker. That’s the real reason the sheriff cancels so often. I’m actually surprised you still get Uncle Alex to play with you guys."

Michael shook his head, smiling almost against his will. Josh was right. Michael *did* win occasionally, but not as often as Max did.

"Come on, Josh," Max coaxed, interrupting Michael’s train of thought. "Play with us. We’ll go easy on you."

"Yeah sure." Josh gave a disbelieving snort that made Michael snicker. "I’ve heard that one before. Right before I went into the kind of debt that made Claudia’s college loans seem about as painful on the wallet as Monopoly money loans."

There was a pause during which Josh must have capitulated to the inevitable and plunked himself into Kyle’s empty chair, because the next thing Michael heard was Josh asking in a resigned voice: "So why are you guys playing cards on a Saturday morning anyway?"

Max laughed. "You missed the morning, Josh. Slept right through it. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon."

"You’re kidding." Josh sounded horrified. Thinking of his own wayward sons, all Michael could do was shake his head; teenage boys and teenage sleep patterns never changed.

"How could you guys let me sleep through most of Saturday?!"

Michael chose that moment to walk back into the dining room, just in time to catch Max’s response, which just happened to be directed at him and Alex: "Do either of you remember anything in the parent manual about being an alarm clock?"

Alex grinned. "I never got the manual in the first place. And in any case, getting teenagers out of bed on weekends was Izzy’s territory."

"If I got a manual--" Michael smirked at the memory as he sat down-- "then I think Nikki made it explode because it definitely wasn’t around when Maria and I were trying to keep the twins out of Kyle Valenti’s jail cells."

"Funny. You guys are really funny." Agitatedly, Josh ran his hands through his hair, and for a minute, Michael thought he looked as if he were seriously considering tearing it out. "Why didn’t anyone tell me that this week was ‘pick on Josh’ week?" Josh moaned. "If someone’d told me, I would’ve made a point last Saturday of sleeping through the whole week, not just today."

Max smiled gently. "No one’s picking on you, Josh. Not really. Sit down. Pick up your cards. Play the hand. And everything’ll be fine."

"There was stuff I was supposed to do today, Dad. Mom gave me this advice last night...."

Max’s smile widened. "She told me."

"I should do something with that advice."

"Probably," Max agreed serenely. "Your mom gives good advice. But you should play cards with us first."

"Why do you want me to play cards so much?" Josh asked suspiciously.

Max deliberately didn’t look at Josh, and Michael thought he saw his best friend’s cheeks redden slightly. "We need a fourth."

Josh narrowed his eyes. "You said that already. Is that the real reason?"

"What other reason could there be?"

"Dad. This is a set-up." Josh gestured to the cards and the table. "I know a set-up when I see one, and this is definitely one. You guys look like you’re up to something. You’re giving each other looks like you’re up to something. So what is it?"

"Josh. You’re beginning to sound like Michael."

"Hey!" Michael scowled at Max, and Max just laughed. Which was a typical Max reaction, Michael thought in irritation. It wasn’t enough that he won their card games all the time; he had to be good-natured about everything too.

Josh rolled his eyes at them in disgust. "I’m entitled to be paranoid, okay? I’ve had the week from hell."

"And what made it the week from hell?" Max asked as if he didn’t know. Which was another typical Max reaction, Michael observed; Max liked to draw out perceptions.

"Oh, I don’t know. Let’s see." Josh began to tick off his grievances on his fingers. "I got shot, I got found out, I got my crush revealed to not only the object of my crush but most of the world, I got subjected to not one but two bird-and-the-bees talks by both of my parents, I found out I wasn’t just a Czechoslovakian but a bioengineered Czechoslovakian, and I found out that I not only chose my life’s mate at sixteen, but I now need to convince her of that. Did I miss something?"

A small smile played across Max’s features. "You *have* had a tough week, Josh. That’s why you should sit down and play cards with us."

"Dad--" Josh heaved a long-suffering sigh-- "did anyone ever tell you you have a one-track mind?"

"Not exactly in those words, no." When both Michael and Alex snorted in disbelief, Max shrugged. "Ignore them," he told Josh. "We’ve been friends so long, they think they know everything."

"We *do* know everything about you, Maxwell," Michael pointed out. "And it’s all pretty boring."

"Izzy always calls you an open book for a reason, Max," Alex added helpfully.

Something about the idea of Max’s being an open book made Michael mentally stop in his tracks. It was true. Max had always been easy to read. Especially to Michael, who had known him literally forever, and whose second banana-ness meant that he’d seen him in just about every situation possible.

Michael laid his cards face-down on the table and watched Max, Josh, and Alex joke back and forth over their cards.

It was scary, he thought as he watched them, how easily he slipped into taking the people who meant the most to him in the world for granted. His cheesehead was too brash and forward to let him do that to her for long. She had fought tooth and nail for their life together, she always said, and she wasn’t going to let him mess it up. His children were like their mother, miracles in themselves who he never took for granted (not that they would let him either). He and Izzy had worked so hard to make their non-destined sibling relationship work that neither of them ever forgot how important it was. He had let Alex and Liz into his life so cautiously that he was always reminded of the effort it had taken whenever he saw them. But Max ... Max had always been the quiet backbone of their group, their leader, the one they all relied on. He had been Michael’s best friend forever. And Michael had been Max’s second banana forever. And sometimes Michael got so caught up in his role and his own issues with it, that Max himself got lost in the shuffle.

Not that Michael didn’t know Max, because he did. Max was a hero, plain and simple. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, Michael had always thought, a hero was someone who was too angry, too hungry, too cold, or too tired to give a damn. That was the kind of hero he was, and he felt no shame in it. He had no illusions about himself. But Max was different. Max was the one person out of a hundred who was a hero simply because he was born a hero -- the real kind of hero, like Sir Galahad and King Arthur and that guy who stood defiantly in the path of four tanks in Tiananman Square rolled up into one person.

Michael had always been a realist. He knew better than anyone -- except maybe Liz -- that like all heroes, Max had clay feet. Michael had realized it in high school, around the time that their destinies had been revealed to them. As their lives had fallen apart, Michael and Max had fought over everything it seemed -- over human-ness versus alien-ness, over the orb, over Topolsky, over Tess. Then Michael had told Max that he no longer respected him, that he used to look up to him but he didn’t anymore. All Michael had been able to see -- with his narrow, stainless expectations of Max as someone who was always better at everything than he was -- was a betrayal of his hero; all Max had seen was a failure of understanding that was equally a betrayal. Each of them had felt that the other had failed him because when it had come down to it, they had failed to match minds, and *that* was the disintegration that had been so hard to forgive. Each had had an absolute expectation of understanding, and it was only because they valued that understanding and each other that their failure to communicate had been nearly fatal to their friendship....

Then Pierce had entered -- and exited -- their lives.

Two things had kept Michael sane after Pierce’s death: Maria’s unshakeable love for him and Max’s absolute faith in him. Someone had once said, a "true friend walks in when the world walks out," and that was how it was for Michael. Maria and Max had believed in him when he hadn’t believed in himself. Together, they had put him back together, and that was when Michael had promised himself that he would never underestimate the power of someone’s believing in him and being willing to trust him. That was true friendship. That was--

"Hey, Michael," Max said, snapping his fingers under Michael’s nose. "Wake up. Are you in or out?"

Michael stared at his cards, surprised to see that Max had dealt him a royal flush. How ironic, he thought briefly as he flicked three peanuts into the center of the table. "I’m in."

They played for a while, and Michael actually won twice in a row. Which was untypical enough to make Michael, who hardly ever smiled, almost smile. After about the fifth hand, Josh put his cards down and stood up. "That’s it. I’ve done my duty, Dad. I’m outta here."

"One more hand?" Michael looked up from studying his cards at Max’s seemingly innocuous question and noticed a glimmer of humor in his best friend’s eyes. Sensing what was coming, Michael almost smirked again but restrained himself.

"Before you follow up on your mom’s advice," Max said, "I should probably tell you the one thing your mom and I both forgot to mention in all the birds and bees talks yesterday ... the card game theory."

Josh sat down again and fiddled with his cards. "The what?"

"The card game theory."

"I heard you. What’s the card game theory?"

"It’s simple. I promise it won’t take up a lot of time." Max let out a little laugh. "This is the card game theory: fate or destiny -- whatever you want to call it -- hands you the cards, Josh. But you play the hand. That’s it. So. Are you going to call or what?"

"I’ll call."

"The phone’s over there, remember."

"Funny, Dad. You’re a regular comedian, you know that?"

"I know. Your mom--"

"--always says that. Yeah, I know."

"I’m not kidding though, Josh. You should call her."

"Who?"

"Andrea, Josh. You should play your hand. So, are you going to call?"

"I’ll call."

"Do you mean the cards or the phone?"

"The phone."

"Good call."

"Very funny, Dad. You’re a riot. You know that, right?"

Finally, Michael laughed out loud. Max’s sense of humor was genuinely weird, and it had gotten weirder over the years. But Michael didn’t mind Max’s sense of humor. Because Max was the one person -- along with Michael’s cheesehead -- who had always thought that Michael had been born to be a hero too, that he was one of those "one guys out of a hundred," like that guy in Tiananman Square. Like Max.

And because sometimes, Max and Maria’s faith in him was strong enough that Michael believed he was that kind of hero too.

After all, being that kind of hero had always been in the cards for Michael Guerin.

He had just needed to play them right.

***

Author’s Notes:

The opening of this story refers to Old West lore. Legend has it that Wild Bill Hickok was holding two black aces, two black eights, and a nine of diamonds right before he was shot by Jack McCall at one of the three poker tables in Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood, South Dakota ... hence the name "dead man’s hand."

Walt Winchell is the someone who said: "A friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out."

And the famous photograph of the man who stood in front of four tanks in Tiananmen Square may be found at this URL: http://www.christusrex.org/www1/sdc/tank-1.jpg.

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