I was lucky enough to know the love of a man twice during my boyhood years, but only the second one was human.
My name is Elliott. You've heard of me. You may not know my name, which is only one of many things I'm eternally grateful to Doctor Keys for, but you've heard of me. The news broadcast would've been twenty-eight years ago now, I think. "The alien botanist, known only to the NASA team as E.T., returned to his homeworld due in large part to the aid of an unidentified local boy." Mom and Doctor Keys arranged that. Sure, you probably think I'm nuts. Humanity's first confirmed contact with extraterrestrial life - I'd have been famous, not to mention rich from the TV interviews alone.
But I was heartbroken.
Those first few months after E.T. left, my entire world was that spot in the forest where we'd said goodbye for the last time. I'd stand in the company of the tall grass as the sun set, close my eyes and breath deep of where we'd stood, and in my mind's ear his soft, gentle voice would whisper that single word into the breeze: "Come."
It's amazing how such a simple word can echo such a vast sentiment. The promise of a life no human had ever lived before, life on an advanced alien world. The child psychologist Doctor Keys has me going to, he said I'd shown an uncharacteristically adult wisdom in my terse response. Standing alone amidst the foliage on my planet, the fauna that had so allured my friend to visit here, I often repeated the silent plea, as if in hope that he could hear me.
"Stay."
Sure, I'd meant it the way the psychologist said. As a way to show E.T. that I didn't have a place in his world any more than he had in mine. But that didn't mean it wasn't also a genuine offer, a plea against reason and logic that the love we shared, in so many ways stronger than the bonds of a married couple, would be enough to convince him to remain on Earth. I could still feel the link between our brains, the longing we had for one another in that moment. It was hard to tell where my feelings ended and his began. The psychologist says that that's why it's hitting me so hard, because I felt both his grief at losing me and my grief at losing him.
Anyway, the point is I was devastated, and Mom and Doctor Keys both knew it, so they did what they had to to protect me, keep me out of the papers and the news hype that followed our official First Contact. But they couldn't protect me from everything.
"Elliot."
I turned my head and offered a solemn nod to Doctor Keys, who came and sat next to me. I was in the woods, of course. In Our Spot. My homework was spread out in the clearing in front of me, but I hadn't actually been doing it. Some days were harder than others, and this was one of the harder days. Doctor Keys, he didn't speak right away or ask me about why I wasn't reading any of my textbooks or why my pencil wasn't out. He gave me time to adjust to his presence before speaking, which I always appreciated more than I could ever express in words at the time.
Eventually, though, reality demanded that he break the silence. "Elliott, the Pentagon is starting to become more... insistent. About your debriefing."
I sighed, averting my deep green eyes from his blue ones. For some reason I could never bring myself to lie to those ever-humble blue eyes. "I don't know anything they'd want to hear."
Even before First Contact, people would always tell me I had an old man's soul. An old man in a boy's body, they'd say. Well, Doctor Keys was like the opposite of that - he had a boyish soul, so wondrous, even perhaps charmingly innocent. If I was 11 going on 50, he was 42 going on 10, which to my mom made him particularly endearing. I guess that's why she didn't mind that he said the government wanted him to keep around us for awhile, to see if our encounter with E.T. had changed us somehow.
I resented it, at first. To me he was every sort of bad there could be, and the nicer he was to me, the more I hated him for it. He charmed his way into my mother's and brother's and sister's lives, like he was trying to replace my dad. And then he tried to charm his way into my life, like he was trying to replace E.T. for me, too. But time went by and, despite myself, I found myself getting to know about him, and talking about him in my therapy, and even sometimes wanting to tell him about something I learned in school or heard on the radio. He even sat down and tried to play D&D with me and Michael, which was hilarious because he couldn't tell THAC0 from a death save, but it was nice that he tried.
I closed my eyes as I felt his hand rest against my back, and my mind flashed to the feeling of them against my bare skin when he'd pulled me away from that cryogenic container that they'd been trying to haul E.T.'s body away in after they thought he'd died. "They're not going to take my word on that, Elliot," he replied. "They're going to want to hear you say it yourself."
I sighed, resting my head against his shoulder. "I don't want to talk to them," I murmured. For awhile, Doctor Keys didn't say any more, and I was content to lay there against him and get lost in the feeling of his hand running through my dark brown hair. I could feel my prepubescent four-inch erection straining against the fabric of my Fruit of the Looms, but I dared not look down to see if it was making an impression through my sweatpants.
That was the /other/ reason I hated Doctor Keys. I wasn't an expert in the ways of sexuality, but I knew that it was the scent of his Old Spice cologne and the feeling of his hand through my hair that was driving me crazy. It was just after Halloween that we'd met - not a time for shorts and T-shirts, even in northern California. But now spring was blooming, and on two occasions now I'd seen him without a shirt, mowing our lawn and driving fence posts into our yard. Ever since my mind recorded that first image of his shirtless form dripping sweat in the California sun, my dreams have been replaying it. The images just keep flashing - him shirtless, him touching my back, him looking over me on that hospital bed, clutching my hand and saying, "I'm glad he met you first."
I let out a sigh and, as much to calm down my hormones as any other reason, finally brought myself to the needs of the present. "What are they going to ask, anyway?"
I felt, rather than saw, the rise and fall of the good doctor's shoulders. "Things. Whether you could hear E.T.'s thoughts, I suppose. Whether you still remember how to build that machine that sent the signal to his homeworld."
That piqued my interest. I turned my head to look at him. "Didn't they just get it from the forest after?"
"Sure," Doctor Keys admitted, "but they don't know if they've duplicated it right. They'll want you to look at it, I'm sure."
I considered this. "Do you think, if E.T. phoned back, that they'd let me talk to him?"
That got a laugh out of him. "They'd probably /demand/ it. You're our best ambassador to these people, what with your connection to him. It's been all your mother and I could do not to convince them they should wait for the school year to end before trying to convince you to move to Cape Canaveral."
"I wouldn't want to move," I responded matter-of-factly. "He wouldn't know how to find me, then." I picked at a piece of the grass. "Alright, tell them I'll meet them." Then, of course, since I was still a kid, I grinned and asked, "Will this get me out of finals?"
Doctor Keys smirked, ruffling my hair a little harder. "Yeah, probably."
"Awesome."
============================================== This is intended to be a 5 part story. I'm really slow, so expect a solid year between updates, but it'll be finished. :) Love/hate mail always appreciated. In case it isn't incredibly obvious, this is fan fiction based on the 1982 movie "E.T. : The Extra-Terrestrial." The characters are being used under Fair Use, I'm not George Lucas, etc. etc.