FIC: With Intent To Stay 2/2

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Part 1

With Intent To Stay - Part 2


The ships are maybe a week out. There’s still nothing coming from the leaders of the various countries, it lends credence to Ryan’s thought that though they have to know that the ships are coming they’re not going to make a statement until they’re visible to the people of this world.

By then it’ll be too late.

He’s heard the stories, the whispers from his people that remember the invasion of their own world. They’d tried a peaceful solution and had been slaughtered.

Peace is not an option for those coming.

He wants to call people; wants to call those that he’d called friends. Wants to talk to Spencer and have him tell him what he should be doing, wants to warn him and tell him to hide, run, don’t look back.

Then he remembers that Spencer and the others had left messages on his phone that had been awful enough that Mikey had thought it wiser to not allow him access to them.

He has no one but those that he surrounds himself with. His guards, his keepers.

He lives now for those moments when someone has to step away; Tom is on the other side of the truck, giving William an update on his status, sometimes Frank will do the same to talk to Jamia privately. When he’s alone, utterly and completely he can forget for brief seconds that there are 441 of his people that are waiting for him to take up the crown and lead them.

“Where’s your guards?” he hears from behind him and he turns, blinking, thinking that a tech is joking with him when they more frequently ignore him.

He opens his mouth and sees the shifter bracelet on the wrist of a teen-age boy. His eyes widen and he turns, flee, run, hide, scream, scream, scream echoing in his head.

An arm goes around his neck from behind and he struggles, gasping for the breath to scream as a hand slaps against his mouth.

Then nothing.

*

Tom comes running, breathless and pissed.

“Have you seen him?” he gasps, bent over at the waist, hands on his knees.

“What?” Gerard comes to his feet, across the room he can see Mikey and Frank pushing themselves away from the table. He doesn’t need to ask who. There’s only one person on this tour that would have Tom like this.

“He was,” Tommy coughs, “he was waiting for me, William called for his update and I went around the truck ‘cause he hates it when I stand right there talking about him, and when I came back he was gone.”

*

No one saw anything, heard anything. There are no signs of a struggle, there’s just… there’s nothing.

It’s like Ryan was never there, and he was, Mikey knows this. They all know this.

Gerard makes the call, he’s the oldest of them, the expression on his face says that he would cede this responsibility to anyone else that wanted to take it.

*

He wakes up in a room that smells like death. Or what he would imagine death smelling like.

It’s dark and he’s not chained to the metal table that he’s laying on, he thanks god for small mercies. It would be pretty fucking hard to figure out a way to escape if he had to first figure out a way to get free of restraints.

He takes stock of his surroundings as rolls to his side, he’s dizzy, the room spinning in the way that it used to when he drank a bit more then his body liked.

When the room stops spinning and his stomach stops protesting the fact that he’s moving and settles slightly he slides off the table and stands there, supporting himself on the table while he waits to see if his legs will support him.

He takes careful steps to what he imagines is the door, runs fingers down the seam, tries the handle and is not surprised to find it locked and sealed.

Now that they have their prize they’re not going to risk him escaping.

Except he has no intention of being a prisoner of either the shifters or those that are coming in the ships they’re most likely flying to meet.

He scans the room, then walks in, looking for anything that could be used as a weapon. He’s not staying here, but first he has to get out of the room.

There’s a metal stool sitting to one side of the table that he’d been laying on, he wonders if they’d come in and stared at him. He doesn’t feel the weight of the shifter bracelet on his wrist and he doesn’t need a mirror to know that he’s himself right now.

He goes to pick up the stool, praying that it’s not fastened to the floor in some way. He’s not Mikey; he doesn’t think that he can construct a cutting tool from the parts in the room.

It’s not fastened down and he lifts it to bring back to the door, he stills when he hears the locks clicking.

There’s six it sounds like, he has the stool in his hands and doesn’t know if he’s hoping for both of the shifters that grabbed him or just one, or if it even matters.

The door opens and there’s a shadow as someone walks in, Ryan doesn’t wait, doesn’t hesitate, just swings the stool with all his might and when the shadow stumbles back he swings again.

The shadow crumples to the floor and Ryan drops the stool with a loud clang, turns the body of the shifter over, he’s just a kid, younger then the one that had come to Mikey with Alicia’s stolen face and body. He finds the laser on his hip, sealed into his holster and it takes way too many seconds for him to get it unsealed and the laser out.

By the time he has it in his hand and is coming back to his feet with the help of the wall he hears footsteps.

“What was all that noise?” he hears before he sees the shadow.

He fires the laser without thinking and has his finger ready to fire it again when he hears the thud, when he peers out in the hallway he sees the other shifter.

They normally work in pairs; hopefully even with these two being as young as they are that’s still the case.

He shoves the laser into the back of his pants, it’s uncomfortable but he’s unwilling to put it down on the ground while he drags the shifter in the hallway into the cell he’d been confined in.

He presses the locking mechanism into place and heaves an almost relieved breath, then pulls the laser back into his hand and starts down the hallway.

He hears the voice, mumbling to itself before he ever sees anyone, he starts peeking into the rooms, the voice is soft, weak, he thinks whoever it is has been drugged and that means that the shifters have someone else, maybe even someone human, on this ship that they’ve kept alive.

He finds her in the third room on the left, she’s in a shifter holding tank, the orange liquid in the tank is a sedative that’s absorbed through the skin. They must have taken her out at some point, for some reason and then not stayed until she was all the way under, because she’s clinging to the side with the fingers of her left hand and the mumbling that he’s been following is her trying to talk herself into pulling herself out.

“Can do it, you can do it, can do it,” she’s repeating over and over again.

He touches her fingers to let her know that he’s there and scans the room, there’s a pair of long vinyl gloves on the console in one corner and when he goes to get them he finds they come up almost to his shoulders when he pulls them on.

He latches onto her arms and pulls, the liquid trying to pull her back down and he thinks the only reason they manage to get her out is she somehow gets her legs pulled up underneath her, something has to give and the liquid finally does. He goes stumbling back, still gripping her arms as he gets her fully out of the tank, they end up in a pile on the floor together.

She’s breathing and making sounds of relief and he rolls her slightly to the side so he can pull the gloves off and come to a sitting position.

“Are you okay?” he asks as he flings the gloves aside. Once she answers that, his next question is going to be about why they’d left her alive. Normally shifters killed those that they took to get their forms.

“Tired,” she mumbles, she blinks at him and he gets a good look at her and doesn’t have to wonder if the startled look that’s crossing her face is identical to the one on his.

Because he knows that it is.

“Alicia?”

*

There’s more of their elders in the room then Gerard feels comfortable with. None of them are assigning blame or pointing fingers but he thinks that’s only because 3/4 of them had assumed that their Prince had never made it here and hadn’t even thought to be assigning people to look for him.

The finger pointing will happen eventually.

William is grumbling beside him.

“So I guess we should talk about our options,” one of the elders says. Gerard thinks that his name is Alan; he’s never actually met most of these people before.

“We get him back,” Gabe says, Gerard nods in agreement.

“How do we even know this boy is our prince, he could be an imposter, a shifter in the guise of what we imagine our prince to look like.”

“When you see him you’ll know,” Frank says, his eyes glitter.

“Yes, well none of us actually got to see him, did we? We just have your word that he’s alive. You kept him secreted away like you thought one of us would betray him, like we weren’t trustworthy enough to know he was alive,” the woman speaking is an older woman, Gerard thinks that she might have been a nanny for one of Ryan’s older brothers.

“It was his wishes that we followed, his decision to make,” Gerard says.

“Scans show that a ship took off shortly after the time that he was taken,” one of the female elders says. “Do we really think that he’s still alive? Maybe we should be thinking of finally crowning our King and sending a statement.”

They all look over at where Kevin is sitting sandwiched between his parents, his brothers behind them. Kevin looks small and young.

“I don’t want to be King,” he says, his voice is soft, quiet, it’s still easily heard.

“Kevin…” his mother starts, she lays a hand on his leg.

“No, he’s alive, still and I don’t, I never did… and it never mattered before, not having a crowned King, why does it matter now?”

“They won’t take an offer of surrender from anyone else,” his mother says.

“We’re not surrendering,” Gabe snarls. His hands are clenched into fists at his side.

Gerard leans forward in his chair, hands laced together he opens his mouth to say… something, he’s not sure what when his phone ringing interrupts him.

“We’re supposed to turn our phones off in meetings,” someone mutters in an annoyed tone. Gerard ignores it, fumbles in his pocket while the phone rings again and again.

There’s a number that he doesn’t recognize on the display and he pauses for just a second before he presses the button to take the call.

“Hello?”

“Gerard?” The voice is familiar and he almost drops the phone when he realizes who it is.

“Ryan?”

The room explodes into pandemonium.

*

Ryan can hear stuff on the other end but he’s trying to focus on Gerard’s questions.

“Where are you, we’ll send someone to get you,” Gerard says. There’s a flurry of sound then nothing, Ryan assumes that Gerard got tired of trying to yell over the voices to be heard on his own phone and went to a different room.

He can still hear a quiet hum, so he assumes that Gerard was followed by at least one person, hopefully Mikey.

“What exactly did Mikey do to my phone?” he asks, he can see black outside the window, and he’s a lot closer to the moon then he ever thought he’d be.

“What do you mean?”

“Well I’m pretty sure I’m not paying for ‘other side of the moon to Earth coverage’ and if I am someone else is paying for it because the roaming charges must be astronomical and I really don’t have a job anymore so…”

There’s silence for a moment, he knows that the phone didn’t get hung up because he can still hear the quiet hum of voices.

“Other side of the moon?” Gerard asks carefully.

“Did I not mention that we’re on a ship,” Ryan says, they’re in what he’s assuming is the cockpit, there’s a lot of screens and things that he doesn’t understand, he really should have pushed the whole ‘learn how to fly a space ship’ part of his bucket list, but he’d thought he had plenty of time.

Alicia is slouched over in a seat in the back of the cockpit, when he twists to look at her she’s almost always looking back at him.

She has questions, and he doesn’t have the time to give her answers at the moment.

“No,” Gerard says, “no, you didn’t mention that you were on a ship,” there’s the sound of someone muttering; “Gabe would like to know why you’re referring to yourself with the royal ‘we’.”

“No royal we, I’m not alone,” he looks back at Alicia, she waggles fingers at him and stares at the screen that shows, in rather prominent detail, the fact that they’re not on Earth anymore, her eyes are a little wide, he thinks she might be in shock.

“You’re not alone,” Gerard says.

“No, and I don’t believe she’s inclined to kill me though she could be lulling me into a false sense of security,” Ryan says, Alicia manages to arch an eyebrow and quirk her lips at him.

“So is Mikey there, because I need someone who knows how to fly a spaceship and that is unfortunately not me.”

“Ryan?” Mikey is there, his voice is slightly more faraway then Gerard’s.

“Did you put me on speaker?” Ryan asks. He hates talking on speaker phone.

“Yes, and you’re gonna need both hands so you should put us on speaker as well,” Mikey says.

“Okay,” Ryan says, he takes the phone away from his ear and fiddles with the buttons. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” Mikey’s voice comes through the phone speaker and Alicia makes a noise, hand flying to her mouth to muffle it. Ryan turns back to the console so he doesn’t see the tears in her eyes; he sets the phone down on the top of one panel and crosses his arms over his chest.

He senses Alicia move up next to him and looks over at her, her eyes are bright but there’s something like hope in them.

“Okay, this is really easy, flying a ship is just like driving a car,” Mikey says, Ryan and Alicia sort of stare at each other in disbelief and Ryan makes a noise that he hopes reflects that exact emotion.

“I’m not sure what kind of whacked out car from the future you’re driving,” Ryan says slowly. “But mine has a gas pedal and a brake and a steering wheel and a fucking dashboard.”

“Ships have the same thing.”

“No, Mikey, they don’t. There’s a seat and like eight screens, there’s no gas pedal or brake or steering wheel or fucking dashboard.”

“The screens all control a different aspect of the ships motion; you said that you have someone there with you?”

“Yeah,” Ryan says.

“Good, is she conscious? Because you need someone to shut off the auto pilot while you actually fly the ship.”

“And why do we need to turn off the auto pilot? It’s kind of keeping us flying at the moment.”

“Because I’m 99% sure that the auto pilot is taking you directly where you don’t want to go,” Mikey says reasonably. “We need to get auto pilot off and you turned back around, and we have to do it quick because otherwise we’re gonna have to launch a rescue and it’ll take a year for the other room to come to a consensus as to how we’re gonna do that.”

“Alright,” Ryan makes a motion with his head and Alicia makes a face as she settles herself gingerly into the seat on the right, the arms come up as soon as she sits down and when Ryan sits in the seat on the left the same thing happens.

“Your co-pilot should have two screens in front of her…”

*

While Mikey is giving Ryan a verbal hands-on lesson in how to fly a spaceship Gerard, Gabe and William crowd around his laptop looking for somewhere to land them.

“It needs to be someplace deserted,” William says, “just in case they come in hot.”

Gerard nods, he remembers the first flying lesson he had, they’d almost crashed, he’s really glad that Mikey is the one talking Ryan through how to do this. Although it would be nice if Ryan had already had at least one hands on flying lesson with Mikey or one of the others there to help him out.

Gerard’s going to make sure they do that as soon as they get him back. Just in case this happens again. It won’t, but probably because it’ll be really hard for Ryan to get snatched again if he’s locked up in Fort Knox.

“Here,” Gabe says, pointing at the screen. Gerard nods his agreements and uses a sharpie he found in his pocket to write the coordinates on the back of his hand.

*

“Fuck,” Alicia mutters, Ryan hears the silence on the other end, the silence that says that Mikey heard her. She’s been mostly silent since he called Gerard, folded in on herself in a way that Ryan doesn’t think is normal.

“What?” he asks, he ignores the silence on the other end of the phone, worry about it later his brain screams at him.

“We’re the blue dot, right?” Alicia says softly, “I mean, we were the only dot there a few minutes ago and it was blue and now…” Ryan leans over and he sees what she sees, a yellow dot coming up fast on their blue dot.

“Fuck.”

“I know, right,” Alicia nods. “What do we do?”

“Mikey, do shifter ships have weapons attached?”

“Um.”

“Mikey! Weapons or not?” Ryan asks sharply.

“There’s weapons controls in your set of screens, bottom left panel, there should be two buttons, the one on the right is to power up the guns, the one on the right is to fire them.”

“You don’t have to aim them?” Alicia asks curiously and Ryan hears Mikey’s indrawn breath.

“No,” he says after a second delay, “they have auto detect, they’ll aim themselves at the nearest available target. How far away are they?”

Ryan peers at the screen. “I don’t know, the screen shows them about an inch, maybe an inch and a half away.”

“Fire weapons now,” Mikey says abruptly, Ryan presses the buttons in quick succession, hopes that there doesn’t have to be a delay between powering up the weapons and firing them for them to work, because he can hear the panic in Mikey’s voice and that means they’re completely screwed.

“I’m transmitting coordinates to you for landing,” Gerard says, his voice sounds rushed and breathless, and Ryan very calmly thinks, we’re out of fucking time.

This is so not how he thought he’d die.

Gerard is talking and out of the corner of his eye he can that Alicia is pressing things on her screen, though Ryan can’t really tear his eyes away from the weapons control that are showing two red streaks almost joining the yellow and blue dots together.

He bites his lip and Alicia makes a sound, he chances a glance over at her and can see that her eyes are wide and her hands are shaking.

The ship jolts as he hears an explosion come from what he hopes is the other ship being destroyed and not their ship being hit.

“Mikey?” Ryan says. He’s not sure what his question is, he just wants to make sure that someone is still there on the other end. Helping them, guiding them, just breathing so that they know that they’re still alive to hear it.

There’s no answer and when he takes one of his hands off the controls to pick up the phone he sees that not only is the call disconnected it looks like his phone can’t make a connection.

“To be fair it was probably cheating that we were even able to call them anyway,” Alicia says.

Ryan nods.

“Did we get the coordinates before it shut off?” Ryan asks.

“Yeah, but what do we do with them, I mean Gerard had me punch them into a screen but he stopped talking before he could tell me what we do with them after, do we put it back on auto pilot and let the ship guide us in or do we fly ourselves or…” Alicia’s mouth snaps shut.

“Alicia?”

“I just… can’t believe that I just said all that and it’s not a role-playing game or something,” Alicia laughs harshly.

Ryan snorts in agreement. “At least I have something the other guys haven’t done yet,” Alicia looks at him questioningly. “Been to outerspace; it was on my bucket list.”

“Flew a spaceship,” Alicia says, they grin at each other. “So auto pilot or fly ourselves?”

Ryan looks at the controls, looks at where Earth is starting to take up a fairly significant portion of their screen.

“I’ve got no fucking idea.”

*

Gabe is driving like he’s training for NASCAR, there’s two cars behind them and Mikey has his laptop open across his legs.

“How about you not kill us before we get there,” Gerard suggests; William, Frank and he are packed into the backseat of the tiny ass compact like sardines.

Gabe bares his teeth.

“Anything?” he says after a minute, he’s trying to scan the sky with one eye and keep an eye on the road with the other.

“No,” Mikey says, his eyes are glued to the laptop screen, hunting for the tiniest signal from the ship. Any sign that would show that the ship hadn’t burned up in orbit and they’ve sent themselves on a wild goose chase.

“What’s that?” William says from the backseat, Gabe glances in the rear view mirror and sees William, with his head tilted at an awkward angle staring out the back window.

He doesn’t see anything, he scans the sky and he still doesn’t see anything, though he hears the high pitched squealing of a ships engines being pushed to their limits and then it hurtles past them, bright orange flames coming from the back of it and flying way too low if they’re hoping for a landing instead of a crash.

“Go,” Mikey says, Gabe slams his foot down on the gas and they go.

*

The ship isn’t burning, there’s flames coming from the back end of it but Frank thinks that might be because before the ship crash-landed it was being pushed to its limits.

There are no signs of life, nobody climbing from the wreckage whether it be Ryan and Alicia or the shifters that took them in the first place.

Mikey is still moving forward, picking slowly through the pieces of the ship that had broken off at impact, eyes only on the ship and Gerard is following him. Hand on his back when he stumbles.

The other cars are stopping, people spilling out of them and swarming around the ship. Lifting pieces away, trying to make a door or a pathway so that they can get in.

He sees the movement in a section that the others aren’t even working on and he moves forward, Gabe behind him and they pull and push debris out of the way, he finds a hand and he clutches it, squeezes while Gabe keeps pulling things out of the way and Frank starts pulling. It’s not Alicia’s hand, he recognizes Ryan’s long fingers and Ryan is squeezing back, Frank knows that inside he’s scrabbling for purchase, trying to help as much as possible and another hand breaks through the debris and that one is Alicia’s.

He keeps hold of both of them, pulling and squeezing their fingers so they know that someone’s there, Gabe working around him.

“I’ve got them,” he yells, “they’re over here.”

Mikey’s there in a second and Frank wraps both hands around Ryan’s, while Mikey keeps a grip on Alicia’s and the others move around them trying to make a hole big enough for them to squeeze through.

Ryan lets go, yanking his hand away and Frank is too stunned to say anything when his hand disappears back into the debris, then his eyes widen as he realizes that he can see more of Alicia’s arm and then her other hand. He realizes suddenly that Ryan let go because inside the ship he’s trying to push Alicia up and out of the wreckage.

He grabs hold of her other hand and he and Mikey start pulling together, there’s her arms and her shoulders and her head and suddenly she’s out and Mikey is wrapping her up tight in his arms and Gerard is pulling them out of the way as Gabe goes down onto his stomach, reaching down in the hole that Alicia’s body had made trying to get Ryan through before the hole collapses in on itself.

Others are there and they’re shifting the larger pieces of debris out of the way; Ryan’s hands and arms appear, Gabe gets his hands hooked under his armpits pulling.

And then he’s there, stumbling away with Gabe’s arms still wrapped around him, keeping him pulled tight against his side.

It’s eerily quiet, all Frank can hear is Ryan’s hitching breaths and Alicia sobbing against Mikey’s shoulder and then shifting of the wreckage as the hole that Ryan had just appeared through collapses in on itself.

He realizes that he’s on his knees when he looks around and sees that everyone else is as well. They’re all staring at Ryan, eyes wide and awestruck and he wonders if most of them thought that this day would never come.

*

Mikey’s still got his arm over Alicia’s shoulder; he hasn’t let her move very far away from him since they pulled her from the remains of the ship. She sits curled up in his lap in the car, head on his shoulder and Gerard bites his tongue.

Because she can go to a hospital and she probably should. But she’s already said no and Mikey’s not pushing anything, he’s just letting her cling to him.

Gerard thinks that if it were him and it had been Lindsey that had been taken he’d be doing the same exact thing.

Ryan has his arms wrapped around himself, his breathing is still funny and Gerard is pretty sure that he probably has cracked ribs, if not broken ones.

They’ve got healers that will look at him once they reach their destination, if they every reach their destination; they’re not the car leading the pack now, there’s a car in front of them and car behind them and every person in those cars is on high alert and certainly not driving like Gabe had been.

When they stop in front of the meeting place again, Ryan has his hand on the door before they’re even stopped. Gerard pushes his way out of the car and opens it for him, offering his arm for him to lean on and Ryan makes a face at him.

“I’m fine,” he says, voice soft. His eyes are still dazed, there’s pain in them as well. Gerard bites his tongue again.

He’d been all for going to a hotel, calling the healer to them and letting Ryan be treated, letting him get cleaned up and sleep for a little bit.

Ryan had been the one that said that he needed to be seen first, he needs the others to know that he’s real and alive.

Gabe is helping Alicia out of the car, letting her hold on to him as Mikey climbs out, then transferring her grip to him.

He’s pretty sure that however his brother had thought about telling Alicia the truth, her getting kidnapped by shifters, rescued by their prince and then crash-landing in a spaceship had not been among the scenarios that he’d envisioned.

Ryan leads them in, how he knows where to go, Gerard doesn’t know. But he’s heading right towards the large conference room.

He stops right outside the closed doors though, doesn’t enter, just turns to look at them and then he holds out an arm, gesturing towards the closed the door. He makes eye contact with Alicia and when she smiles a watery smile at him he nods once.

She’s tucked under Mikey’s arm when they walk in, William to the left of them, a couple of the others trailing behind.

“She shouldn’t be here,” he hears from inside and he scowls at the door, when he looks back he can see Ryan’s eyes narrowed.

“She’s not one of us, who are you to bring her here without authorization.”

Ryan makes a noise that sounds angry and pulls the door open.

“I gave her permission to be here,” he says, his voice sounds cool and angry and Gerard takes two steps so he’s right behind him, the others that have remained out in the hallway arranging themselves in positions long since forgotten.

Some things are ingrained from birth though.

Some things you just know how to do.

When Ryan walks through the door Gerard is half a step behind him to the right, on his left Gabe is mirroring him.

He sees the exact moment when it hits the room who is standing before them, and the second after when they all go to their knees.

Gerard is on his feet, Gabe beside him as well. Of those that had been in the room when they entered only Alicia is still on her feet, though Mikey is tugging on her arm like he’s trying to pull her down.

One of the elders bows his head lower, “Your highness,” he says, softly, reverently.

“She has permission to be here,” Ryan says, softly, he doesn’t raise his voice, he doesn’t need to, there’s not a sound to be heard other then his voice.

“She risked her life to help me get back here, she didn’t ask any questions, she just helped, she has every right to be here and she would have those rights even if she weren’t married to one of my Guard.”

“Of course your highness,” the elder says, the words sound stiff and formal. “Your will of course.”

“My will,” Ryan nods. “My will dictates that you all rise, because we have things to do and a very short time span in which to do them.”

*

He stands by the door, there’s a sheaf of papers in his hands, the last seven designs for the crown that will be placed on their King’s head.

Gerard thinks that Ryan would be happier with no crown, or possibly one made of pink plastic, Frank had actually bought one in jest though for some reason it had ended up on Ray’s head and with Pedicone calling him his pretty Princess.

Gerard thinks he’s better off just not knowing.

Ryan’s on the floor in the middle of the room, there are comfortable chairs and a bed, every time he comes into this room though; Ryan is sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor.

The bed is kind of made, it’s the only sign that he has that Ryan actually sleeps in the bed and not curled up in the middle of the floor with a blanket pulled around him.

Ryan calls it his cell, Gerard calls it safe keeping. And as far as cells go it isn’t so bad.

There are two TV’s on, nothing about spaceships just barely out of the Earth’s orbit; Ryan’s not looking at them though, he’s tapping away at the laptop sitting open on the coffee table.

“Are you going to hover in the doorway?” Ryan asks, he doesn’t look up and he doesn’t stop tapping away at his keys.

“I didn’t want to interrupt,” Gerard says, he shuts the door behind him and crosses the room. Ryan looks up and away from the laptop. His fingers hover just over the keys, like he could start typing again any second.

“More designs for the crown?” he makes a gesture at the paper in Gerard’s hand.

“Yeah,” he holds them out and when Ryan doesn’t take them sits them in a pile next to Ryan’s cellphone.

“Is there anything in there that doesn’t scream I am King, let me show you how big my dick is by shoving this big pile of metal on my head?”

Gerard bites back a grin and a snort.

“There’s two at the top that I think are good,” he says instead.

Ryan moves his fingers over the top of the paper, shifting the top sheet over so he can see the top two side by side. He pushes the second one down toward Gerard with the tip of his pointer finger.

“That one,” he says.

“You’re sure?”

“At least I know I won’t tip over because I’m top heavy,” Ryan says, a half smile crosses his lips and then fades away when his phone starts vibrating.

They both stare at it and Gerard can see ‘Spencer’ flashing across the screen.

“Are you ever going to talk to them?” he asks, he picks up the paper that Ryan had pushed at him, he doesn’t need it, the minute that he saw the new selections he’d known this one would be the one that Ryan chose.

“No,” Ryan says, he turns his attention back to his laptop, he doesn’t start typing until his phone beeps and indicates that he has a new voice message.

Spencer’s the only one that’s called since Ryan left the message stating that he’d changed his number, Gerard wonders if the others are waiting for Spencer to actually make contact. He wonders how many times this makes it that Spencer has called and Ryan has let it go to voice mail that he doesn’t listen to. He wonders if Spencer will give up or if Ryan will finally answer the phone before he does.

He wonders.

“I can hear you thinking,” Ryan says, his focus is back on his laptop.

“Are you waiting for him to give up, or are you mad about the messages that they left originally? Because you know Mikey…”

“I know Mikey didn’t listen to them,” Ryan says. He hits the backspace button a few times and begins typing again. “I’ve got other things, more important things to worry about at the moment. Spencer will still be there when things calm down and if he’s not,” Ryan shrugs, “well it’s not like we were actually talking before anyway.”

“When will the crown be done?” he asks, Gerard looks down at him and there’s a ghost of a smile over Ryan’s lips.

“Day after tomorrow, William and the Jonas’ are putting together the ceremony now.”

“Hmmm… maybe we’ll even manage to get me crowned before the ships show up and they kill us all.”

*

The ceremony is quiet, Mikey knew it would be, he’d spoken to Gerard about it, about how the ceremony’s of old were conducted and that’s what he’d said.

They were quiet, full of solemn faces and no talking; just the sound of breaths being taken; just the hum of excitement.

It takes them 32 minutes to get all 441 of them situated around the platform where their oldest elder will place the new crown on Ryan’s head, a new crown for a new King.

Kevin is behind Ryan when he walks through the door; he’ll get his own crown, will replace Ryan as Prince and he’s already been very firmly declared second in line to the throne of a non-existent world.

He clutches Alicia’s hand tightly. She’s the only outsider here, Ryan had insisted that she be here and the Council of Elders couldn’t say no, she’d risked her life to help Ryan get back.

They wouldn’t allow any other spouses, not at this ceremony. Mikey knows that if Ryan has his way that the barriers between those 442 survivors of a destroyed world and the rest of this world that they now dwell on will be crumbling soon.

*

He’s alone in his room, there’s a crown on his head and even though it’s smaller then the ones they tried to make him choose it still feels heavy with the weight of responsibility’s that he never thought he’d be the one that had to shoulder.

He’s sent the message, the warning that this planet is theirs, that these people are theirs… the ships that were days away from entering the Earth’s orbit, days away from being visible to the naked eye have stopped moving.

They haven’t left, they have to know that they don’t have any weapons here, but that doesn’t mean the Earth is without defenses and if it means unshadowing themselves, making themselves known to the leaders of this world they will.

He’s already got plans in the works to do just that, he’s not looking forward to it. To the explanations that are sure to be demanded from those he probably should have told the truth to a long time ago.

He’d thought of doing that, but he’s not alone here, he’d had some leeway as their Prince, he has slightly more as their King, but if he’d said a word even just as Prince he would have lifted the veil of secrecy long before they were ready for it to be lifted.

They’re not ready for it to be lifted now, but now they have really no other options.

His phone buzzes beside his hand and he glances down at it.

Spencer.

He’s been writing out what he’s going to say for three days, and he’s still not sure if the words are right or not. He’s never second guessed his words, normally they go on paper the same way that they sound in his head and he gives them to Brendon or Jon and it’s fine. But there are things that he wants to say, truths that he wants to tell and he can’t.

Not yet.

He can talk to him though, to them about things that don’t have anything to do with the alien races and alien wars and anything alien in general.

His phone continues to buzz and he hesitates, hand hovering over it before he draws a breath and picks it up, cradles it in his hand.

He knows what he has to say, what he can say, at least to start, the rest will come in time he’s sure; so he presses a button and the phone stops ringing.

“Hi Spencer.”