Alex wasn’t sure what to say to that. He didn’t want to leave Michael either, but he felt useless. Worse than that, he felt like he was a burden. If he hadn’t needed protecting, if he’d been able to stand up to his father and tell him to fuck off, then they wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place.

“I’m not leaving you,” he whispered. But even as he was saying them, he didn’t know what the promise meant. He wouldn’t go off and enlist? He’d take Michael with him? That whatever decision they ended up making, they were going to do it together. Maybe that one. He needed to be able to stand up to his father, he knew that much.

And being in the air force, well, wasn’t it the air force that was supposed to be responsible for hiding the existence of little green men? Even if the men in question (and woman) were neither green nor little. But he could see that he wasn’t going to be able to logic his way into or out of his with Michael and, to be honest, not with himself, either. They both needed time to recover from the last few days.

“Let’s find you a cast, though,” he said after a minute while his brain tried to work through the problems at hand. “If it looks like it’s being taken care of, nobody will question how well it heals.”