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Thank you very much for another successful big bang!

I know I’ve said this before, but it truly has been humbling and astonishing to see our small fandom rally together year after year, coming together to create, and share stories for the RNM Big Bang.  The hope was to build a community of creators, to start collaborative partnerships, and hopefully make some friends along the way. I hope that has been true for all the creators. Everyone who participated over the last three years has my respect, my love, and all my gratitude for sharing in this adventure. But like the incredible show that brought us all together, the journey of the RNM Big Bang has also come to an end. It’s been an honor and a pleasure getting to know all of you, and I’m confident that there will be another similar event that creators can join in the future. You can find all of our stories and art on our AO3 Collection. This blog will stay open so people can find the wonderful works created over the years.  Thank you for letting this small yearly event be a part of the incredible RNM fandom, and for supporting all the creators in it. In community with all of you, @insidious-intent

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— Against a rule set for us by time by @infallible-dreamers

It was a joy to illustrate this twisty time travel fic for @rnmbb. It features some of my favorite things: teen pod squad and teen malex, time travel, and some delicious angst (but also fluff!) that comes from said time travel. Enjoy 💕

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Against a rule set for us by time

“We all have our time machines. Those that take us back are memories. Those that carry us forward are dreams.” - H.G. Wells, The Time Machine Michael Guerin never had the best timing. One day he discovers a strange device that gives him the ability to move through time. He only realises the potential when he saves a stoic classmate, Alex Manes. As Michael begins to get to know Alex better, he begins to realise time itself is a consequence of their choices. The future may not be as set or as inescapable as either of them hoped.

I’m so happy to finally be able to share my story for @rnmbb. Featuring art by the talented @bydayornight. And beta-read by the wonderful @purplehoodiesandleatherjackets

Read it on AO3.

Michael was late yet again. 

It wasn’t even his fault this time. He might have snoozed his phone like he did everyone morning, but was still able to throw on his dark flannel and jeans, and run a hand through his messy curls in less than two minutes, all with enough time to make the drive to school.

However it was the universe that was never in his favour and Michael was ultimately delayed because he had to spend the better part of the morning trying to fix his beaten down pick-up truck. 

“You should just sell it.” 

He had heard Max say it countless times since he’d bought it. He would encourage him to save up for something better as if it was that easy, and in the meantime just swallow his pride and accept their offer for a ride. He could never get rid of it, though, it was the one possession that he truly owned. He had worked long hot, summers at the auto yard to save for it, and if the engine didn’t stall occasionally, would it have even been his truck? 

After some time, he’d finally heard the lovely splutter of the engine before it burst into life. 

He skipped the shower, opting to just wash the grease of his hands and go. 

He should’ve skipped class instead, but Isobel had sent more than one worried text to him and he knew that he was going to get an earful, plus it was AP calc, and he had some rapport with their teacher only because he did well in the subject. Michael hadn’t tested how far that empathy would stretch if he was late to class, now had to be a good time. When he arrived, he looked through the small panel beside the classroom door. The teacher was distracted, reading a graphic novel as students worked out of their textbooks. Feeling he could risk it, he quietly opened the door and slipped into his seat.

When Mr. Harris looked directly at the latecomer and continued reading without paying him any further regard, his shoulders finally relaxed and he turned, giving a quick wink to Alex Manes in the seat behind, the one witness to his heroic feat. Alex just rolled his eyes, clearly not as impressed as Michael was.

Isobel on the other hand was impressed:  ‘Lucky!’ His phone reverberated with a message tone.  Michael glared towards the other end of the classroom, where Isobel mouthed an apology as she hung her head to hide her giggling. Michael did hear the stifled laugh from behind him as well, one of the few reactions he’s ever gotten from the quiet emo kid. 

“Mr. Guerin, if you’re not going to come on time, the least you could do is silence your phone.” 

He should have just skipped today.

Read the rest on AO3

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go and read gritkitty’s amazing @rnmbb fic an elusive network!!

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Art for “a love like this” by @angrycowboy for @rnmbb 2022.

Please do yourself a favor and go read her gorgeous, epic (70k+) roswell new mexico fanfic over on ao3.💙

There’s even more malex illustrations by yours truly in it 😉👽

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I shall be your wings

an Ever After AU for Malex

story by @bekkachaos

art by @bean-me-up

T | 47k | 10 Chapters | Complete ✅

Read now on AO3

Prince Michael is set to be wed to a noblewoman, an arrangement made by his late father. He can't stand the idea and so one night he rebels, running from the castle on horseback.

Alex is all but a prisoner in his father's house, forced to work and wait on the man and his brothers to earn his keep. When he stumbles into some money he uses it to take to court and try to buy back one of the other servants, Arturo, and does so by impersonating a noble.

While in court, he speaks out of turn and Prince Michael sees him, letting him plead his case and becoming instantly intrigued by the sharp-witted stranger.

All Alex wants is to get back, but Michael is persistent, and somehow Alex manages to call him arrogant, which only spurs his affections on. But Alex can't give Michael his name when he asks, because then he would know that he was a fraud, as Jesse Manes is someone known to the monarchy.

So Alex gives him a false identity and leaves Michael to dwell on thoughts of him, thinking he would never need to see him again.

Only, fate seemed to have other plans.

Created for this year's Roswell New Mexico Big Bang @rnmbb I had so much fun creating this, and I hope you guys enjoy reading it!

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“Oasis can’t be home, not anymore.” “Why not?”

He’s silent for a moment, and Alex feels the deep breath Michael exhales as he leans back to look at him.

“Because you’re not there.”

Another kiss, and then another, and Alex wants to believe it. But it means that the only thing tying Michael to Earth is him. And that feels like an overwhelming amount of pressure suddenly at the realization.

– from “a love like this” by @angrycowboy for @rnmbb

Read the rest on ao3. 💙

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Music of My Heart

Summary: For the first time in his life, Michael wanted nothing more than to have a home with Alex, a family to call their own to make up for the shit hand they’d both been dealt. He wanted it so much it hurt like a physical blow to the chest. A family. Him and Alex. Their own family and home together.

His hopes and dreams all changed in the blink of an eye, though, once Jesse Manes found out about them.

Pairing: Michael Guerin/Alex Manes

Additional tags: Canon-Typical Violence, Teen Romance, Teen Pregnancy, Mpreg Alex Manes, Kidnapping, Jesse Manes is his own warning and war crime, A LOT of Angst, I promise it has a happy ending, Alien/Human Relationships, Angst with a Happy Ending, canon divergence from the toolshed scene, Roswell New Mexico Big Bang 2022, Caulfield Prison (Roswell New Mexico), Deep Sky (Roswell New Mexico), good guy Jim Valenti, Nora Truman lives, Canonical Character Death, Implied/Referenced Character Death, sticking with the show’s usage of 90s songs for titles, title comes from a NSYNC song

Word Count: 62375          

Gifs are in chapter 15, but can also be found here and were created (along with the header) by the wonderful @angrycowboy​

Yes, it’s a teen!Malex fic. Yes, it’s an mpreg!Alex fic. Please give it a chance, though?

Read it on AO3

@rnmbb​

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Summary: Michael is the perfect son to the Dictator, but meeting Alex makes him question and test the boundaries of his relationship with his father until he's forced to choose between his loyalty to his father and his love for Alex.

Tags: Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe, Implied Sexual Content, Daddy Issues, Darkish Malex, Sci-Fi inspired by Star Trek lore, Triad - Freeform

My contribution to this year's @rnmbb! I wanted to explore some of the alien lore that we learned in s4 and hope I was able to deliver on some of the cool sci-fi aspects.

I was suuuper excited to be matched with @ms-three who has made some gorgeous art for the fandom. And created this INCREDIBLE piece of art to go with the fic. Send some love her way!

Chapter two will be up later today or early tomorrow. Just need to get it beta read once more before posting 😊

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Some illustrations for @bydayornight lovely fic soft sounds from another planet you can read on her AO3 !

Thank you for trusting me with your vision of The Oasis, it was a pleasure to draw scenes from your story 💕

@rnmbb

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soft sounds from another planet

When Alex Manes accidentally gets whisked off to an alien planet, he reluctantly accepts the help of a mysterious stranger to save his friends and get back home.

An Oasis AU where the 1947 crash never happened, loosely based on Spirited Away.

Written for @rnmbb. Artwork by @slynella. Beta-ed by @burntotears.

Read on AO3

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If there was one thing that Alex Manes had learned from war, it was that anything could become a new normal. He wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or not, but there was something to be said about both his mind and body becoming seemingly adaptable to ever-growing extremes. 

For the first seventeen years of his life, Roswell was his world, a cowboy town where he lived under the shadow of his last name and where he’d always thought he’d die, suffocated by this place or his father’s hands.

But it’s been ten years since then. Ten years of doing things he would have found untenable at seventeen. Ten years of looking into the eyes of a person and seeing a target. Ten years of asking yourself if your ticket out of a dead-end hometown was worth someone else’s soul, much less your own. Ten long, formative years, so much of it spent in other deserts, oceans away.

When it comes to the world, maybe he’s seen enough.

He’d spent his whole life honing a very specific skill—cutting out actions borne from emotion like a cancerous tumor. The trouble with cancer is that it has a tendency of coming back, especially when you don’t root out every single malignant cell.

That’s all it takes to lose a leg—an emotional decision, a well-timed bullet. Add in the vagaries of combat medicine, a bit of karma—he’ll even admit to some plain old bad luck too, when he’s feeling generous—and the point still stands. As hard as he tries, Alex can’t completely excise all of his hot-blooded impulses. But that doesn’t stop him from taking a biopsy of all his missteps so he can observe them up close, study how to do better next time.

The recovery was painful and slow, the world around him even slower to accommodate, but he’s adapted there, too. The initial shock wore off more quickly than he expected, replaced by more day-to-day frustrations. It was possible losing a limb might’ve deepened the darkness he’s always incubated within his soul. After all, he’s read all about the emotional risk factors of amputation. But in reality, he finds it’s more of a drop of ink in an already deep, dark ocean. There’s something funny about this, or maybe it’s just that his sense of humor has become twisted beyond recognition.

Some things are harder to accept, like his face in the mirror, all hard lines and a scowl he can’t seem to erase. Rosa calls it his resting bitch face, and she’s not wrong, he can definitely be one mean fucking bitch when he wants to be. But that’s not what he sees when he looks at his reflection these days. Instead, he sees a person who’s donned a uniform, not to fight his father anymore, but to fight his father’s war. 

Now Master Sergeant Jesse Manes stares back at him, mouth pressed in a stern line. It’s an especially bitter type of loss when you lose the battle—not because you fought hard and were bested, but because you become the thing you were trying to fight—and the enemy subsumes you completely. 

But, back to the matter at hand. It’s possible he’s found the absolute limit to his adaptability, because he’s not sure accidentally wandering onto an alien planet will ever work its way into becoming normal.

Read on AO3

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Two Cowboys Learn To Love Each Other

https://archiveofourown.org/works/43909165/chapters/110401954

My Valevans story for the Roswell New Mexico Big Bang @rnmbb and @bean-me-up

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Begging for some grace by @dankmalexmemes for @rnmbb

Art process under the cut

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- Wir alle sind aus Sternenstaub by @meggie-jolly for @rnmbb

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Wir alle sind aus Sternenstaub

When Alex walked into the Wild Pony on New Year’s Eve, the party was already in full swing. Maria had bought the Pony a few months ago and had decided to host a big New Year’s party. She had begged Alex in multiple emails to come and, much to his surprise, he had actually been able to move his leave around and be in Roswell for New Year’s. 

For the occasion, he had even embraced his former teenage self a little and bought new eyeliner. It had felt really weird, but also oddly comforting to put it on for the first time since the day he had left Roswell to join the Air Force. 

Aside from the eyeliner, his teenage self would probably be disappointed in his outfit. No black nail polish, no jewelry beyond the dog tags hidden under his shirt. His shirt was black and his jeans on the skinny side, but no one would consider his outfit punk or emo.

He still felt more like himself than he had in a long time, but also slightly alien in his skin as he walked through the bar. He had only visited the Wild Pony as a patron a couple of times while he was on leave, yet it felt incredibly familiar to him. Mimi DeLuca had sometimes let him, Maria, Rosa and Liz visit her there when the bar had been closed. 

He spotted Maria behind the bar and walked over to greet her, absentmindedly checking what familiar faces he saw around the bar. 

Maria squealed when she spotted him reaching over the bar for a somewhat awkward, but very tight and enthusiastic hug. 

“Alex, you made it!” She looked him over once she released him. “And you’re wearing eyeliner! What a throwback. I love it, you look amazing.”

Alex laughed. “Thank you, you look amazing too. The Wild Pony suits you. Congrats on buying it, by the way.” 

“Let me do my job then, what do you want to drink?” Maria asked with a grin, “best friends who I haven’t seen in way too long drink for free tonight.” 

“Well, I’m not sure how good of a business decision that is, but I’ll start with a beer,” Alex said with a laugh. “On the topic of long lost best friends, did you manage to persuade Liz to come?” 

Maria’s smile dimmed a little and she shook her head.  “No, when I invited her she said something about a work thing that sounded a lot like she’d just made it up. I get it though, there are too many memories of Rosa and her mom here.” She handed him a beer. “Have you heard from her lately?”

Alex sighed and took a sip, “I don’t really hear from anyone. The internet is never great, not all of our private communications are as private as I would like them to be and it’s not exactly easy to engage in smalltalk doing what I do. You’re pretty much the only one I hear from semi-regularly.”

Well, for a while, on and off, he’d heard from someone else, but he pushed that thought down as far as he could. 

Maria nodded, but before she could answer, one of the other bartenders called her name. “Sorry, I have to go check on that, we’ll catch up more later, okay? Enjoy the party!”

Alex raised his beer to her as Maria hurried off to take care of whatever had come up.

Turning a little to rest his elbow on the bar, Alex looked around. He’d seen some familiar faces earlier, but no one he knew well enough to be interested in catching up. That would probably only lead to someone awkwardly thanking him for his service and then a lot of tense small talk because they wouldn’t know what to ask and Alex wouldn’t really be able to tell them anything about his job anyway.

It wasn’t as if he had a personal life worth discussing and most of the people here would still remember him as the kid who was rumored to be gay. Neither the military nor his sexuality were topics he wanted to discuss with almost strangers. 

To his surprise, he spotted Isobel Evans not too far from him at a table. He definitely hadn’t expected to see her here, unless something changed since the last time he’d been in town, Isobel and Maria couldn’t stand each other. Of course, where Isobel Evans was, Max Evans was never far. Alex spotted him carrying drinks over to the table Isobel sat at. 

After spotting the Evans twins, Alex decided to stop looking for familiar faces, in fear (or hope) of finding one in particular. Instead he focused back on his beer and waited for Maria to come back over. 

His strategy didn’t work, only a few minutes later he heard a laugh he could recognize anywhere. Whipping his head around, he spotted a painfully familiar head of curls sitting with the Evans twins now. 

Continue reading on AO3

You can find the amazing gifs made by @manesalex to go along with the fic here.

Written for the Roswell, New Mexico Big Bang 2022 @rnmbb

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Looks like I missed sign-ups for this year, is this a yearly thing? I'm asking so I'll know to watch for sign-ups next year. Thanks!

Hello!

RNM Big Bang is a yearly thing yes, so you should see sign ups around every summer

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RNM creatives!

We’re looking for folks who can help support the wonderful group of big bang writers this year. 

If you have some time, enthusiasm for storytelling, and passion for editing, sign up to be one of the betas for RNMBB

RNMBB Betas Sign-up

As always, questions are welcome here or via our email!