Fic - When The Old World Falls Away (Sara, Michael/Sara) R, 1/1
Title: When The Old World Falls Away
Rating: R
Summary: Her world hits the concrete around her, shattering into a million pieces that she’ll never be able to put back together.
Spoilers: Set Pre - Series, season one and Season two.
Author's Notes: Veers off slightly into the land of AU, but has definite canon undertones. This is mostly Sara Gen with Michael/Sara thrown in because I couldn't resist. It's angsty. There are liberties taken. Thanks to StealmyKiss for the beta and encouragement. Hope you enjoy. Concrit = Love.
Prison Break and all related elements, characters, and situations are © to Paul T. Scheuring and Fox Television, All Rights Reserved. This is a work of fiction, no infringement is intended, no profit is being made.
[one]
Sara’s mother is a devout Catholic and every Sunday Sara can remember up until the time she is ten is spent in church. She remembers her mother telling her to sit up straighter, pay attention more -- expecting her to be every bit the prim and proper girl her pretty dresses and shiny shoes demanded she be. Years later when she looks back on it, Sara doesn’t remember her father’s absences. Instead, she remembers the sadness that would settle somewhere deep inside her when she watched other girls with their own fathers. She remembers the looks and the that poor little girl comments, but not her father, never her father.
It’s hard, she muses looking back, to remember something that was never really there.
When she is ten her father goes from lawyer to politician; a person who never once cared about faith and Jesus into a man who believes in God, but also the death penalty. A man of ‘quiet faith’ the papers would write years later during the race for Governor. He bends his views to get himself elected. Compromises himself to the point where people don’t know where Frank Tancredi begins and the lies stop. Her mother being who she is bends to his will as easily as he bends his own to other’s.
Ten-year-old Sara is so idealistically, horribly naïve and trots happily along in her pretty little dresses and squeaky clean shoes, missing the warning signs of what was yet to come. She tries so desperately hard to do the right thing always so her father would be proud of her; so he would come home.
Her Mother stops taking Sara to Sunday mass and instead settles on a quaint, Christian church on the outskirts of Chicago. Her father trades in his wife’s happiness for higher ratings in the polls; her mother trades in bits and pieces of her soul to please a man who is never around.
By the time she is twelve they’ve stopped going to Church altogether and her father’s presence dwindles down to almost nothing. Sara starts to find vodka bottles hidden in the clothes hamper, the freezer. There are times when she waits after school for hours for her mother to come pick her up. The girl she was doesn’t understand the looks of pity and quiet whispers or her mother’s malice and constant state of exhaustion. She doesn’t understand the void in her life where her father should be. The woman she becomes because of it all understands perfectly.
Sara’s thirteenth birthday arrives and she spends it watching the front door, listening for the phone -- doing what her younger, naive self does -- she waits for her father. Some time around dinner, long after the deafening realization hit that he isn’t coming, Sara crawls into her mother’s lap, crying so hard she can barely breathe, looking for the sort of comfort only a mother can give.
“He promised he’d be here, Mommy,” she cries into her shoulder, desperate for condolence, desperate for her father. “Why isn’t he here?”
Sara doesn’t realize what is happening until her mother’s hand lands squarely across her face. Sara clutches her stinging cheek and moves away, sobbing harder. “Stop crying right now,” her mother demands and Sara tries, but can’t and despite the way her mother’s breath wreaks of liquor, her words are cuttingly lucid. “Your father is a fuckin’ liar, Sara. That’s why he’s not here. Hopefully some day you’ll realize that the bastard isn’t worth your tears.”
That night, Sara cries herself to sleep, hiding her head under her pillow so her mother won’t hear. The next morning she wakes and searches the house for her father. The surprise she feels when she fails to find him is minimal. The next day she promises herself she wouldn’t count on a phone call that deep down she knew would never come and wouldn’t cry when it didn’t. Sara stops counting on her father altogether.
“I’m sorry, Sara,” her mother says softly when she finds her daughter sitting numbly on her father’s side of the immaculately made bed, tracing patterns in to the blanket, feeling so utterly and completely abandoned.
For what, Sara isn’t sure. Her cheek stings with the possibilities.
[two]
At fifteen her mother’s health is starting to fail and her father tries to ease back into her life like he’d never left. She starts smoking, staying out all night. Her mother sleeps her days away and doesn’t notice; her father cares but it comes too late. Half of her thinks, knows, she does it just to spite him, to make him look bad. To hurt him like he hurt -- kept hurting -- her.
Sara has her first drink at a party Jeff, her then best friend, drags her to. It’s a shot of tequila and it burns as it slides down her throat and warms her to the core. She likes the feeling of warmth and comfort it brings to her unnaturally cold life and grabs another.
Jeff’s parents are separated, and Sara can relate because her cynical, fifteen year old self admits that what her parents have is the farthest thing from a real marriage you can get. He is cute and he makes her laugh. He calls her beautiful. They spend their abundance of time together and pretend their lives aren’t what they really are. They drink and smoke, try pot once, but only once. Jeff understands her and Sara can relate to him like no one else. She likes the consistency of him the best, the familiarity he brings into her life and somewhere between parties and studying for their biology exams he turns from goofy friend into something more.
“Jesus, Sara,” Jeff whispers between kisses, mistaking her shaky hands for nervousness rather than what it really is.
His hands tangle themselves in her dark hair, pulling her head affectionately to his, lips claming lips. There is tenderness in his movements, mistaken uncertainty in hers. She thinks she wants this -- it’s clear he does -- and there is every chance she won’t remember this tomorrow, but he doesn’t have to know that. The two of them fumble around on his too small couch in the corner of his cold basement for a while. Hands search, sometimes slowly, sometimes frantically in that awkward way that only two shy, fifteen year olds can manage.
“Jeff,” Sara whispers, and it’s then, as her shaky hands try to push him away, mind on another drink rather than the guy above her, when she starts to find ways to spin the truth. She whispers ‘no’ but it’s too little, too late. A muffled grunt and Sara can taste her tears mixed with his sweat and she swallows thickly and closes her eyes, watching what was left of her innocence fade away into oblivion like a third party observer.
Her legs are boneless as she climbs up the stairs to her room that night, and she trips over her own feet, wincing at the light her father clicks on as he makes his way out of the bedroom. Her eyes are red from spending the car ride home crying, her voice horse from arguing with Jeff because he just didn’t understand. Sara stares up at her father, bathed in light like some sort of fucking angel and her, a drunken mess at his feet, and the sight alone makes her sick to her stomach.
“Where the hell have you been?”
She stomps up the rest of the remaining stairs, gripping onto the rail for support. “Oh, please,” she grits out angrily, her words a slurred mess -- just like her. “Do us all a favor and stop acting like you give a fuck.” She slams and locks the door behind her, falls onto her bed as her room spins around her and sobs into her pillow until she falls into a restless sleep.
The next day she barely remembers the night before and it is a blessing and a curse.
She tries to sometimes, but it just hurts too much then.
[three]
Sara enrolls in Northwestern so she can stay close to her mother, to take care of her. Towards the end of her senior year, life is a blur of doctors appointments, cold weather and awkward dinners with her father while her mother spends time in and out of the hospital, bedridden. She dies a month before Sara’s eighteenth birthday, her liver finally giving out after decades of constant abuse. Sara listens emotionlessly to the priest during the funeral, stares at the casket in front of her, the dark wood such a contrast to the bright flowers lying on top of it, and thinks maybe her mother's death had something to do with loneliness too.
While her father is by no means a good husband, or even a mediocre dad, Sara hasn’t been a good daughter to the parent who deserved it most, either. She had been so intent, so focused on doing everything possible to hurt her father these past few years that almost everything else had slipped into the background. Her mother was a drunk, a mean drunk, but at least she had been there. It isn’t much of a toss up between a drunk mother and absentee father, but, to Sara, the fact that she stuck around meant something.
An “Amen” echoes throughout the large church, and Sara says it a beat after everyone else -- her face stoic and detached as she goes through the motions without even thinking. Her father reaches for her hand, clearly distraught, and grabs on like she is his lifeline. Sara holds on for a few seconds before letting go. It’s trite and so not them and the insincerity of it makes her stomach lurch uncomfortably. She hates him so much she can feel it in her bones. She blames him and even though the words are never spoken aloud, they both know it.
A sob rips through the packed church and she remembers tears and her mother kissing every bruise, every scratch; Sara refuses to cry.
Afterwards is the reception, hundreds of people crammed into the living rooms, the kitchen. She does her rounds; hugs cousins she’s never met and aunts she hasn’t seen forever. Meets people who she swears didn’t even know her mother, but were there because she was the wife of a congressman. She looks for her father, noting his absence, and catches sight of him off to the side, strategizing with his campaign manager. She is so angry at the sight she wants to throw something at him, stand on top of a chair and scream, ‘look, guys, this is the man you elected, this is the guy who can’t even spend a damn hour grieving for his own wife. He’s a joke. A big fucking joke.’
Furious, she slips out from the swarm of people and into her father’s library. She locks the door behind her and pours herself a glass of his perfectly aged scotch and thinks of her mother. Thinks about how she knew what the different types of liquor smelt like before she knew how to read. She remembers going in to her mother’s room after spending the afternoon listening to the angry tones of a particularly bad argument, laying a hand over her mother’s fragile one and whispering, “I hate him too.”
She gulps down the amber liquid in a fluid motion and realizes she has never been so completely alone.
[four]
College brings boyfriends and classes and new friends. A new life. She barely speaks of her father, or even to her father sans a five minute too long phone call that comes routinely every Sunday afternoon. He lives in his own world completely free of her, and she has forged a whole new life completely independent of him. Sara starts down the same path she had begun to forge years before -- drinks and smokes too much and goes out with boys who are so utterly and completely unworthy of her.
There is Griffith who is cute and funny and comes from a normal family and even though he’s not all there upstairs, she lets him into her life because there is something about the way his fingers travel up the expanse of her arm, feathery light, that pacifies her. He kisses her like she is the only thing in his world and she adores it, starts to bend at his will every once in a while because of it.
Griffith talks her into trying pot one lazy afternoon in his dorm room when it’s just the two of them with nothing but time. She does and doesn’t bother to tell him it’s not her first time (she thinks of Jeff and shudders at fading memories long past) and coughs as she takes the first drag. Sara remembers why she never liked it before; feels sick as the usual lucidness that accompanies her life fades away into a distorted haze. Sara likes clarity, feeds of it, and hates not being able to list all the elements of the periodic table and swears she’ll never do it again.
Only she does, because Griffith asks and it’s there and really, what was the harm anyway?
There’s an incident her junior year involving a speeding ticket and open liquor bottles and a bag of pot hidden in the trunk. They’re arrested, and she’s so mortified that she throws up on the side of the road all over her shoes, and all she can do is watch her entire future flash before her eyes and slip out of her shaking hands. When they give Sara a chance to make her one phone call she’s caught in a weak moment. She doesn’t know who else to call so she calls her father.
There’s bribery (she’s sure of it) and promises of rehabilitation, a hefty donation to the school and Sara and Griffith are let of the hook. No one even thinks twice about it. Her father looks at her with something reminiscent of complete and utter disappointment and it almost, almost bothers her. The Sunday afternoon phone calls become few and far between. Sara and Griffith go their separate ways and that does bother her, but he flunks out later that year anyway.
Northwestern is challenging, but all together not that hard because she’s smart, always has been, and she doesn’t have to work as hard as most people because things just click into place for her. She has that ambition that drives her faster and farther than everyone else. The biology and chemistry and memorization of this procedure and the place and shape of the 206 bones in the body comes easy. Her people skills need work, but she doesn’t let that deter her and by the time she graduates and enters med school she has the friendliness down pat.
Her father never makes it to her graduation.
[five]
Three years into med school, almost a year into interning at Chicago General and Sara hasn’t had a drink in months, hasn’t touched a drug in years. She smokes like a chimney, but it’s better than the alternative, and somewhere along the line she finally realizes that if she wanted to do this whole doctor thing, and do it right, she had to stop being such a hypocrite. Sara starts to clean up her messes (old and new) instead of drinking them away and it refreshes her. Gives her a fresh start that she clings to like a lifeline.
Jason walks into her life on a cold as death night in October at a birthday party for an old friend from college. Med school is almost over and she is deathly afraid of what might come next, but she is trying to push forward and not look back. Jason is blonde, cute. He gives her a look from across the crowded room that keeps her warm all night.
He offers to buy her a drink and despite the fact that she hasn’t had one in almost a year, she obliges. Sara hasn’t talked to her father in months, hasn’t had person to person interaction (other then patient/doctor) in weeks and she is tired of feeling alone. Tired of being alone. She hasn’t had a boyfriend since college and she has never been one to have an abundance of friends. She has herself convinced that she doesn’t need anyone, but has this innate need to feel needed. There is a void in her life that she can’t seem to figure out how to fill despite the fact that she’s been desperately trying for what seems like forever.
Jason tells her a stupid joke and she laughs anyway. Is so enthralled by the attention he is giving her, by the companionship he is offering her. Her hand shakes with anticipation as he hands her the wine glass, but it tastes glorious and the alcohol warms her to the core. She orders another drink, a scotch this time, and before she even realizes what is happening they’re back at his rundown apartment a tangled mess of sweaty limbs and labored breaths.
It’s a mistake, but making mistakes is something Sara has always been better than good at, and as she lays there and watches him smoke her last cigarette she finds that following old patterns is so much easier than trying so hard to create new ones.
“So,” Jason begins, letting out a puff of smoke into the already stiflingly stale air. “You work at a hospital, right?”
Sara doesn’t see the error in her ways until it is too late.
[six]
She hides it well at first. No one notices her unexplained absences, her grouchy moods, her frailness because she is an addict, always has been, always will be, and she knows how to hide it. It’s controlled. She is always in control -- cool, calm controlled Sara. It was just a few drinks here and there; not every day after work, just some. She’d decline wine at dinner with Jason most of the time, and when she did have a drink it was usually just one. She had it under control.
Jason doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care, because he’s one too and she provides the morphine and syringes and he loves her for it. Sara exists in such a constant, altered state of mind that she’s convinced that that is okay.
Then she starts screwing up on the job. She starts forgetting which bone is which. What the symptoms are for this illness or that disease. She misdiagnoses and scrambles to fix her errors before everyone notices. Sara is constantly playing catch-up to cover up her mistakes and the needle in her arm is a refreshing release at the end of the day, during the day, in-between patients.
“We did the best we could,” Sara would say to a young wife when her husband died during her watch.
It’s how they taught her in Medical School, it’s how she’s been doing it for what feels like forever: not filled with emotion, but not emotionless. She’d watch as the young girl would stare at her in disbelief, or worse an older woman would loose her footing and stumble, stare, opened mouth up at her as if she held all the power. She doesn’t, she realizes now. She’s lived her life for so many years thinking she could save everyone, that she held all the answers, that she was in control. But she isn’t and she never has been.
There’s the kid hit by the car in the street and she is so fucking high she can barely see straight and there are people, frantic strangers asking her, begging her to help and she can’t even figure out what to do. She’s stuck, stationary, is it move them to make them comfortable? Don’t move them? She can’t even remember how to perform CPR and she falls, gracelessly to her knees, the impact jarring her into the harsh reality around her.
The boy is dying and she can do nothing but watch, wide-eyed, hands over her mouth in horror as the threadbare string that was holding her life together frays and her world hits the concrete around her, shattering into a million pieces that she’ll never be able to put back together.
[seven]
Sara gives up the drugs, the booze, the cigarettes. She resigns from her job at the hospital (she likes to stress the fact that she resigned because it sounds so much better than being fired) and checks herself into rehab. Detoxes. Drinks nothing but the apple juice they give her and a few bites every now and then of the bland mush they throw on a plate and try to pass off as food. She goes to meetings, talks about her feelings. Sees a shrink every day at three o’clock on the dot. She gets better.
Jason is long gone -- from Chicago, from her life -- and the clarity that she is accompanied with now tells her that it’s a good thing. She spends her days dreaming of cigarettes and chocolate… of scotch and her fingers itch to feel that needle in between her fingers, the tumbler in her hand.
The track marks on her pale arms serve as constant reminders -- of what she had been, of what she had done, of a past she is trying desperately to rectify -- and when her father comes to visit her once, the only time he ever does, his eyes travel to the marks on her arm, then to her eyes, his own void of any emotion besides disappointment. They beat around the bush -- talk about the upcoming elections, the weather, anything but the problem at hand. His eyes keep traveling back to her arms, eyeing the scars that she wears as a stigma, and she knows he sees it as some sort of judgment on him. She refuses to put on a jacket.
“I just… don’t understand. You could have anything you ever wanted out of life,” she quietly snorts at that and crosses her arms over her chest. “Why did you do this to yourself, Sara?”
“My shrink says it has something to do with having a fucked up childhood, but what the hell does he know?” She deadpans. She’s not supposed to be angry, but she gives herself this, because it is so much easier than letting go.
Her father’s shoulders fall and he looks just about ready to smack her. “You can’t blame this on me.”
“No, you’re right,” she concedes, because she can’t and she knows it. “I stuck that needle in my arm.” Sara’s mind swarms with memories -- spending birthdays waiting for him, cards stamped with his signature, hiding in her room covering her ears in a desperate attempt to block out the angry tones of arguments -- and a place inside of her aches. “But I can’t help but wonder if you would have stopped me.”
Her father opens his mouth, but shuts it immediately and stares at her in disbelief. He looks hurt, devastated, and a part of her is proud. The other (bigger) part of her hurts too -- for what they could have had, for what they don’t have, for the broken relationship they do have.
When he goes to kiss her forehead as he says goodbye, she flinches, but does not move away.
[eight]
After rehab she moves out of her nice apartment into a not so nice one. She spends days re-painting, weeks arranging furniture. She goes to meetings every day. Drinks tea instead of coffee. Buys a plant. She has no idea what she wants to do with her life, no idea if she is ready to do anything with her life again. She volunteers at shelters, does humanitarian work. She calls her father every once in a while and tries not to get upset when his secretary says he’s too busy to talk to her.
She has wanted to be a doctor for as long as she can remember. She wants to help people, and when she thinks she is ready to start working again, Fox River comes out of nowhere and she decides that it is as good a place as any to start over again. Her father is unhappy, but she stopped trying long ago to please him and is finally trying to do something to please herself. Sara works hard at saving those men because deep down she thinks it will help redeem her. To make up for that boy, for those people who may have lost their lives because of her mistakes.
The scars on her arms fade as she slowly puts the mess that was her life back together. She grows accustomed to wearing long sleeves. Some days she runs her fingers over the marks she can barely see, but knows are there and remembers. Katie is a welcomed sight and the first real friend she’s had in years. She doesn’t date, just goes home to her empty apartment and waters her plant.
Weeks melt into months, seasons change and so does she and Sara will always remember that April as the hottest on record, but also because it is when Michael Scofield strolls into her carefully-put-back-together life and tosses it upside down again.
[nine]
Sara takes to Michael because he seems relatively innocent in a sea of murderers and rapists and people who did things she can not even begin to imagine to get thrown into Fox River. He’s educated and handsome, they practically lived in the same neighborhood and there is something about him that doesn’t quite fit. He seems relieved when she tells him about the diabetes, he shows up missing two toes not even a week inside. Something inside Sara nags at her and she knows he doesn’t belong there.
He saves her during the riot, his arm reaching down for hers and she grabs on to it like it is her salvation. He risks his life for hers and it is almost enough to make up for the fact that he lied to her about things like toxic mold removal and Lincoln Burrows being his brother. Michael is charming and sweet and there is flirting and conversations about Baja and fifty cent beers and later, innocent touches, stolen moments that make her blush make something swim gloriously deep inside of her. He makes her a paper flower for her birthday and she carries it around with her all day, covets it like it is the holy grail.
There's something there, between them, and it's palpable enough to leave her hoping for something more, but just like everything else in her life the hope falls short of reality. He’s married and the betrayal that slices through her like a knife at that revelation is enough to make her back away. She refuses to be that woman.
There is a desperate request, information about Lincoln’s case that just doesn’t add up. Conspiracies, murders and she goes to her father and pleads Lincoln’s case half because she believes it all and half just because Michael asks her too. Questions surround him that she desperately wants, needs answers to, but can’t find. He promises her that they are there and she thinks foolishly that one day he will tell her.
Sara’s interest in him crosses the borders of patient/doctor and into something forbidden. She thinks about him in ways that she shouldn’t, obsesses over the way he looks at her, the way his fingers feel against the skin of her wrist. And suddenly she realizes that she has fallen for him.
Michael’s lips on hers and he kisses her, tearing her apart with just a mere brush of his lips and she lets him.
“What do you want from me, Michael?” she asks, breathless.
“It won’t always be like this,” his hands on her cheeks, soft, his voice choked with emotion and her knees buckle. A shiver runs up her spine. Her breath catches in her throat, she can’t breathe, can’t move.
Sara believes him.
[ten]
A day later and everything’s gone to hell. He lied to her. Betrayed her. Stole her keys and for what? Drugs? Needles? She wonders if all he’s ever told her were lies and she feels foolish and so ridiculously stupid for believing he was different, that they had something. He tells her that he and his brother are escaping. Michael asks her to make a mistake, to leave the door unlocked. Sara realizes that she was just a part of one, big master plan and she isn’t quite sure what hurts more: the betrayal or the blatant possibility that he never cared about her at all.
Suddenly she’s back to where she was three years ago, her life rapidly falling apart and she, seemingly powerless to stop it. Her father’s running for the Vice Presidency and didn’t tell her and is possibly mixed up in something that is bigger than all of them combined. She wants a drink, a cigarette, drugs. She doesn’t want to be her anymore.
Maybe she does it because she’s pissed at her father, because she knows deep down that Lincoln is innocent, because Michael asked her. Or maybe she does it because she is just, so, so good at making mistakes. Either way, she leaves the door open and watches, once again, only this time with crystal clarity, as her life collapses around her.
When she returns home she drinks an entire bottle of scotch, rolls the small bottle of morphine in-between her fingers, staring at it as if it held all the answers to her questions. The needle is cool against her flesh and she winces slightly as it pierces her skin. She shakes as she breathes in the high and closes her eyes. In her final moments of clarity she thinks of her father, of Michael, of all the things she has done, all of the things she has left undone.
She wishes for things so impossible.
[eleven]
When she wakes the pristine white walls of the hospital room and the smell of antiseptic are almost comforting. Nurses look at her like she’s a miracle; Sara begs to differ. The Feds are there to question her, treating her as if she is as bad as the men she helped escape. The fact that men like Abruzzi and T-Bag are out on the loose because of her, because of her mistake, makes her stomach lurch violently. It’s number 157 of her list of reasons why she should hate Michael Scofield. Her father refuses to see her, she’s lost her job and when they arrest her she knows it’s a part of her penance.
Her lawyer is a relatively short, slightly balding man who wears bowties instead of neckties. He’s cute in that old man sort of way. He’s from a firm she vaguely recognizes -- the type that charge you an arm and a leg for a mere hour, and she knows he’s here on her father’s command. Despite the fact that her dirty hair is plastered to her face and she’s been sitting in a cell for two days, the sight of this man pacifies her. Then, he looks at her with disgust, brandishing his perfectly capped teeth and she shivers. The world is as disgusted with her as she is with herself.
Sara spends days shaking off the Mahone, going over her story a thousand times in her head, so she has it memorized, down pat and when they ask her to go over it again and again the facts never change. Michael and Lincoln are long gone and she doesn’t know why it is so hard for them to accept that. They release her, the charges are dropped and she returns to her apartment to clean up vomit and throw out empty liquor bottles. She goes to meetings. Stays clean. Every time she turns on the TV there is a news report about the Fox River Eight, his face. Sara stops watching.
Her father winds up dead a week later -- the press claim suicide and slander his name with false notions about political scandals, but Sara refuses to believe it. She finally realizes what she should have months (a lifetime) before: she can’t trust anyone.
[thirteen]
A few days after her father’s death she starts to see the men in nondescript cars, in suits and dark sunglasses every place she goes. At her meetings, at the grocery store, outside of her apartment building. They’re everywhere and the sudden realization that she could very well be their next target slams through her like a ton of bricks. She is constantly looking over her shoulder, checking every room, under every table when she enters her apartment. Locks her doors and windows and checks them twice. She can’t stop worrying long enough to figure out what it is she should do.
She returns one night from the corner market to an apartment that is colder than she left it. She sets down her groceries on the nearest table, turns up the thermostat and reaches for the light switch.
“Don’t turn on the light,” Michael’s voice cuts through her like steel and she spins on her heel, the keys in her hand clattering to the floor. She can barely make out of his outline sitting in a chair far away to the side, nearest to an open window.
Wind wafts through the apartment and runs right through her.
“How the hell did you get in here?” she whispers, taking one, single step closer.
Squinting, she watches him shrug and stand. She takes a step back, he pauses in his movements. She breathes in deeply and swears she can smell him from all the way across the room -- all soap and sweat and that essence that just is Michael.
“Sara --”
“You shouldn’t be here, Michael. You should go, now. Before they see you.”
Michael doesn’t say anything for a beat and she reaches to turn on the light but stops herself. “You need to get out of the city.”
She laughs mirthlessly. “Where the hell do you suppose I go? Huh?” she takes a few angry steps forward until she is a foot away from him. If she squints hard enough she can make out the angles of his face, the sharpness of his cheekbones. She wishes she could see his eyes. “They’re investigating my dead father, they froze his assets. I have no job. No money.”
“I know that,” he sounds tired and he’s trying placate her and she hates it.
“I bet you do,” the resentment in her tone surprises even her.
“I never meant --”
She cuts him off. “I. Don’t. Care. I really don’t. You lied to me, so what, I’m over it. Just do me a favor and get the hell out of here before you get me into even more trouble than I already am.”
There is silence, he says nothing and all she can hear is the sound of her heart beating in her ears and she counts his breaths and tries to ignore the way he’s staring at her as though he can see right through her.
“It wasn't supposed to turn out like this, Sara.”
“I don’t believe you,” she whispers because she honestly doesn’t know what to believe anymore.
Michael takes a step forward and she foolishly lets him. “I never meant to involve you in this.”
“I don’t believe you,” she tells him again.
“You have to trust me, Sara,” he says quietly, his hand tentatively reaching out, his fingers grasping her wrist lightly. She’s weak, and she hates it, but she leans into his touch.
He’s pulling at her heartstrings, at her emotions and she wants so badly to give up and just go with it, but she can’t. There’s too much between them. She pulls away.
“If there is one thing you taught me, Michael, it is that you can’t trust anyone.”
Sara can see him flinch in the darkness and ignores the tug at her heart when he moves away. Something in the room shifts -- his mood, her willingness to hate him -- and when he speaks again his voice is cool and controlled, masked. She’s glad she can’t see his face clearly.
“The people who framed Lincoln, Sara, they killed your father. They know you helped me. They know you’re apart of this. They are going to kill you too.”
She wants to yell at him, throw something at him. She wants to tell him that it’s her fault she’s in this mess even though she knows it’s only half true. She wants to jump him and kiss him and slap him across the face all at the same time. She’s scared of what he’s saying because she’s known it all along and she hates him for saying it out loud. Sara is being pulled in so many different directions that she feels like she’s about to come apart at the seams.
Taking a deep breath in an effort to calm her nerves she rubs her temples and tries, but ultimately fails, not to panic.
“Get on a plane. Go to Baja. You’ll know what to do from there.”
Michael sounds so clear, so certain and all Sara can do is stare at him like he’s lost his mind and wonder if this too was a part of the big master plan.
“They are watching my every move, Michael!” She all but screams hysterically. “They’re outside right now. I can’t even charge a coffee from Starbucks without them knowing it.”
He takes a step forward, invades what little personal space she has left and frames her face in his hands. She too tired to fight it, to exhausted from everything, and she leans into his touch, her eyes closing, and she can taste the wistful sigh on the tip of her tongue, fighting to be released.
“You have to trust me, Sara. You will die if you don’t, do you get that?” He’s shaking her violently, his hands on her face in an almost bruising grip and it jars her eyes open. “This was never about just you and me, it has always been bigger than that.”
Sara wants to push him away, to tell him she doesn’t, can’t trust anyone because of him. Instead she acts impulsively, leans up and forcefully brushes her lips against his. She wants to show him that she has the upper hand, that she is in control (even though that notion is so far beyond lunacy it’s quite hilarious) but most of all she wants to be reminded, wants to know that at least this part of their relationship was real.
The line between the lies and reality was so badly blurred and Sara just wants, needs to know where she stands.
It takes him a second to react, but he does, his hands moving to her hair, hers winding around his neck. His lips move against hers furiously, his body flush against hers wonderfully and it steals the breath right out of her.
“I hate you,” her words are a breath of a whisper against his lips and they both know she doesn’t mean it. Michael kisses her harder, deeper, desperately and she swears she can feel her toes curl. There’s a promise of something more laced underneath the kiss, and as his hands untangle themselves from her hair and he slowly moves away, Sara can’t help but wonder if that promise is a lie too.
A kiss to her forehead then, “just trust me, Sara. Please.”
When she finally collects herself and opens her eyes moments (possibly minutes?) later, he’s gone. She feels empty, alone. She calls out for him, but there is no answer, no proof that he was even there except for an open window and a lone post card on a side table. Fingers trace over the picture of a small town in Panama and shake as she flips the card over. I’m sorry is hastily scrawled on the back and she lets a tiny piece of herself forgive him before she crumbles the card and throws it into the trash.
[fourteen]
A few days later when she can’t sleep, she stands by the window in her room and watches the city beneath her as she sips lukewarm tea. That same car with that same man is parked across the street and she eyes it warily. She can taste Michael’s kiss on her lips, can feel his hands on her skin, his skin under her fingertips. Her heart aches in way she has become entirely too used to. She frantically digs the post card out of the trash.
“I‘m sorry.”
The floor creaks and she jumps, clutching the crinkled post card against her chest as her heart hammers against her ribcage.
Sara knows what she has to do.
[fifteen]
A plane ride (courtesy of Miranda Higgens, a woman who will report her AmEx card stolen a few hours too late) a long car ride, hitch hiking, days and more than a few countries later and Sara, equipped with lighter and shorter hair, crosses the border into Panama. She is huddled in the back of an old rust bucket truck with nothing but the clothes on her back, a pair of cheap sunglasses that are too big for her face, and a duffel bag filled with clothes and a few remembrances of her former life. A small town comes into view and Sara sighs with relief when the ancient buildings and architecture matches the crinkled and fading postcard clutched in her hand.
The clouds threaten to burst above her and the moment seems somewhat anticlimactic. She was expecting beaches, sun and cloudless skies and instead she gets rain and thunder and she’s wearing the same clothes she’s been wearing for almost a week. It almost disappoints her, but Sara realizes that this is her life and when has anything ever gone smoothly for her?
There are a million and one reasons why she shouldn’t be there, but all she keeps thinking was the one reason why she should. She has nothing left in Chicago. Her father is dead. Her mother has been dead for years; her career is over. If she had stayed, she was only biding her time until they killed her too. She is angry with Michael for more reasons that she can count on her fingers and toes, but a part of her still (albeit rather foolishly) trusts him. Sara knows that’s better than nothing.
Stuffing the postcard into her back pocket, Sara gets out at a small port in even smaller town, fumbles her Spanish as she says thank-you and enters the hustle and bustle of the mob of locals. People are pulling her in all different directions, and she says excuse me in a language that is going to take some getting used to and pushes the strap of her duffel bag more securely on her shoulder. She looks very much the part of the tourist she is trying to play looks frantically around for a familiar face, for his face and can barely contain the smile on her lips when she sees Michael across the way staring right in her direction.
Sara thinks, briefly, that it feels a little too easy -- finding him here after a week-long journey with nothing but a picture on a postcard as her compass. But he is there, waiting for her, and the sight alone tells her that she should probably just stop thinking. Instead, she smiles and gives an awkward half wave. He smiles back.
Thunder crackles above them and people scatter to safe harbor as it takes moments (minutes, hours, she can’t differentiate, but it feels like forever) until he is finally standing before her. Neither one of them say anything, they just breathe in the moment, each other. It makes her nervous. He makes her nervous -- all clean and kempt before the filthy mess that she is. She pushes her dirty hair behind her ear, picks at the fraying edges of her grubby t-shirt and avoids eye contact.
“Is Lincoln--”
“Yeah.”
Michael smiles and so does she. They take a step forward at the same time. His hand reaches out, but stops, and she takes a chance, acts without thinking and grabs his hand, their fingers intertwining perfectly, like they are meant to fit together. It feels so incredibly right, so perfect and as the rain begins to fall she knows she has made the right choice.
“Thank you,” he whispers and leans in; his fingers trace her cheek softly. For what, she wonders. Leaving the door unlocked? Meeting him here?
Sara smiles back. “I didn’t do it for you.”
Michael’s lips ease over hers slowly, leisurely. He’s drawing out the moment and she’s making a memory in her mind. They feel different now, his kisses. They make her feel more mushy, more hungry. Less desolate and more complete. Sara’s heart aches in a way she’s fond of and she takes this moment and stores it in her mind, wraps her arms around him and just breathes.
Breathes in the salty sea air, the rain, this moment, him.
It is the closest thing to absolution that Sara will ever get and she clings to it as desperately as she is clinging to Michael and finally, she allows herself to heal.
End.
Rating: R
Summary: Her world hits the concrete around her, shattering into a million pieces that she’ll never be able to put back together.
Spoilers: Set Pre - Series, season one and Season two.
Author's Notes: Veers off slightly into the land of AU, but has definite canon undertones. This is mostly Sara Gen with Michael/Sara thrown in because I couldn't resist. It's angsty. There are liberties taken. Thanks to StealmyKiss for the beta and encouragement. Hope you enjoy. Concrit = Love.
Prison Break and all related elements, characters, and situations are © to Paul T. Scheuring and Fox Television, All Rights Reserved. This is a work of fiction, no infringement is intended, no profit is being made.
[one]
Sara’s mother is a devout Catholic and every Sunday Sara can remember up until the time she is ten is spent in church. She remembers her mother telling her to sit up straighter, pay attention more -- expecting her to be every bit the prim and proper girl her pretty dresses and shiny shoes demanded she be. Years later when she looks back on it, Sara doesn’t remember her father’s absences. Instead, she remembers the sadness that would settle somewhere deep inside her when she watched other girls with their own fathers. She remembers the looks and the that poor little girl comments, but not her father, never her father.
It’s hard, she muses looking back, to remember something that was never really there.
When she is ten her father goes from lawyer to politician; a person who never once cared about faith and Jesus into a man who believes in God, but also the death penalty. A man of ‘quiet faith’ the papers would write years later during the race for Governor. He bends his views to get himself elected. Compromises himself to the point where people don’t know where Frank Tancredi begins and the lies stop. Her mother being who she is bends to his will as easily as he bends his own to other’s.
Ten-year-old Sara is so idealistically, horribly naïve and trots happily along in her pretty little dresses and squeaky clean shoes, missing the warning signs of what was yet to come. She tries so desperately hard to do the right thing always so her father would be proud of her; so he would come home.
Her Mother stops taking Sara to Sunday mass and instead settles on a quaint, Christian church on the outskirts of Chicago. Her father trades in his wife’s happiness for higher ratings in the polls; her mother trades in bits and pieces of her soul to please a man who is never around.
By the time she is twelve they’ve stopped going to Church altogether and her father’s presence dwindles down to almost nothing. Sara starts to find vodka bottles hidden in the clothes hamper, the freezer. There are times when she waits after school for hours for her mother to come pick her up. The girl she was doesn’t understand the looks of pity and quiet whispers or her mother’s malice and constant state of exhaustion. She doesn’t understand the void in her life where her father should be. The woman she becomes because of it all understands perfectly.
Sara’s thirteenth birthday arrives and she spends it watching the front door, listening for the phone -- doing what her younger, naive self does -- she waits for her father. Some time around dinner, long after the deafening realization hit that he isn’t coming, Sara crawls into her mother’s lap, crying so hard she can barely breathe, looking for the sort of comfort only a mother can give.
“He promised he’d be here, Mommy,” she cries into her shoulder, desperate for condolence, desperate for her father. “Why isn’t he here?”
Sara doesn’t realize what is happening until her mother’s hand lands squarely across her face. Sara clutches her stinging cheek and moves away, sobbing harder. “Stop crying right now,” her mother demands and Sara tries, but can’t and despite the way her mother’s breath wreaks of liquor, her words are cuttingly lucid. “Your father is a fuckin’ liar, Sara. That’s why he’s not here. Hopefully some day you’ll realize that the bastard isn’t worth your tears.”
That night, Sara cries herself to sleep, hiding her head under her pillow so her mother won’t hear. The next morning she wakes and searches the house for her father. The surprise she feels when she fails to find him is minimal. The next day she promises herself she wouldn’t count on a phone call that deep down she knew would never come and wouldn’t cry when it didn’t. Sara stops counting on her father altogether.
“I’m sorry, Sara,” her mother says softly when she finds her daughter sitting numbly on her father’s side of the immaculately made bed, tracing patterns in to the blanket, feeling so utterly and completely abandoned.
For what, Sara isn’t sure. Her cheek stings with the possibilities.
[two]
At fifteen her mother’s health is starting to fail and her father tries to ease back into her life like he’d never left. She starts smoking, staying out all night. Her mother sleeps her days away and doesn’t notice; her father cares but it comes too late. Half of her thinks, knows, she does it just to spite him, to make him look bad. To hurt him like he hurt -- kept hurting -- her.
Sara has her first drink at a party Jeff, her then best friend, drags her to. It’s a shot of tequila and it burns as it slides down her throat and warms her to the core. She likes the feeling of warmth and comfort it brings to her unnaturally cold life and grabs another.
Jeff’s parents are separated, and Sara can relate because her cynical, fifteen year old self admits that what her parents have is the farthest thing from a real marriage you can get. He is cute and he makes her laugh. He calls her beautiful. They spend their abundance of time together and pretend their lives aren’t what they really are. They drink and smoke, try pot once, but only once. Jeff understands her and Sara can relate to him like no one else. She likes the consistency of him the best, the familiarity he brings into her life and somewhere between parties and studying for their biology exams he turns from goofy friend into something more.
“Jesus, Sara,” Jeff whispers between kisses, mistaking her shaky hands for nervousness rather than what it really is.
His hands tangle themselves in her dark hair, pulling her head affectionately to his, lips claming lips. There is tenderness in his movements, mistaken uncertainty in hers. She thinks she wants this -- it’s clear he does -- and there is every chance she won’t remember this tomorrow, but he doesn’t have to know that. The two of them fumble around on his too small couch in the corner of his cold basement for a while. Hands search, sometimes slowly, sometimes frantically in that awkward way that only two shy, fifteen year olds can manage.
“Jeff,” Sara whispers, and it’s then, as her shaky hands try to push him away, mind on another drink rather than the guy above her, when she starts to find ways to spin the truth. She whispers ‘no’ but it’s too little, too late. A muffled grunt and Sara can taste her tears mixed with his sweat and she swallows thickly and closes her eyes, watching what was left of her innocence fade away into oblivion like a third party observer.
Her legs are boneless as she climbs up the stairs to her room that night, and she trips over her own feet, wincing at the light her father clicks on as he makes his way out of the bedroom. Her eyes are red from spending the car ride home crying, her voice horse from arguing with Jeff because he just didn’t understand. Sara stares up at her father, bathed in light like some sort of fucking angel and her, a drunken mess at his feet, and the sight alone makes her sick to her stomach.
“Where the hell have you been?”
She stomps up the rest of the remaining stairs, gripping onto the rail for support. “Oh, please,” she grits out angrily, her words a slurred mess -- just like her. “Do us all a favor and stop acting like you give a fuck.” She slams and locks the door behind her, falls onto her bed as her room spins around her and sobs into her pillow until she falls into a restless sleep.
The next day she barely remembers the night before and it is a blessing and a curse.
She tries to sometimes, but it just hurts too much then.
[three]
Sara enrolls in Northwestern so she can stay close to her mother, to take care of her. Towards the end of her senior year, life is a blur of doctors appointments, cold weather and awkward dinners with her father while her mother spends time in and out of the hospital, bedridden. She dies a month before Sara’s eighteenth birthday, her liver finally giving out after decades of constant abuse. Sara listens emotionlessly to the priest during the funeral, stares at the casket in front of her, the dark wood such a contrast to the bright flowers lying on top of it, and thinks maybe her mother's death had something to do with loneliness too.
While her father is by no means a good husband, or even a mediocre dad, Sara hasn’t been a good daughter to the parent who deserved it most, either. She had been so intent, so focused on doing everything possible to hurt her father these past few years that almost everything else had slipped into the background. Her mother was a drunk, a mean drunk, but at least she had been there. It isn’t much of a toss up between a drunk mother and absentee father, but, to Sara, the fact that she stuck around meant something.
An “Amen” echoes throughout the large church, and Sara says it a beat after everyone else -- her face stoic and detached as she goes through the motions without even thinking. Her father reaches for her hand, clearly distraught, and grabs on like she is his lifeline. Sara holds on for a few seconds before letting go. It’s trite and so not them and the insincerity of it makes her stomach lurch uncomfortably. She hates him so much she can feel it in her bones. She blames him and even though the words are never spoken aloud, they both know it.
A sob rips through the packed church and she remembers tears and her mother kissing every bruise, every scratch; Sara refuses to cry.
Afterwards is the reception, hundreds of people crammed into the living rooms, the kitchen. She does her rounds; hugs cousins she’s never met and aunts she hasn’t seen forever. Meets people who she swears didn’t even know her mother, but were there because she was the wife of a congressman. She looks for her father, noting his absence, and catches sight of him off to the side, strategizing with his campaign manager. She is so angry at the sight she wants to throw something at him, stand on top of a chair and scream, ‘look, guys, this is the man you elected, this is the guy who can’t even spend a damn hour grieving for his own wife. He’s a joke. A big fucking joke.’
Furious, she slips out from the swarm of people and into her father’s library. She locks the door behind her and pours herself a glass of his perfectly aged scotch and thinks of her mother. Thinks about how she knew what the different types of liquor smelt like before she knew how to read. She remembers going in to her mother’s room after spending the afternoon listening to the angry tones of a particularly bad argument, laying a hand over her mother’s fragile one and whispering, “I hate him too.”
She gulps down the amber liquid in a fluid motion and realizes she has never been so completely alone.
[four]
College brings boyfriends and classes and new friends. A new life. She barely speaks of her father, or even to her father sans a five minute too long phone call that comes routinely every Sunday afternoon. He lives in his own world completely free of her, and she has forged a whole new life completely independent of him. Sara starts down the same path she had begun to forge years before -- drinks and smokes too much and goes out with boys who are so utterly and completely unworthy of her.
There is Griffith who is cute and funny and comes from a normal family and even though he’s not all there upstairs, she lets him into her life because there is something about the way his fingers travel up the expanse of her arm, feathery light, that pacifies her. He kisses her like she is the only thing in his world and she adores it, starts to bend at his will every once in a while because of it.
Griffith talks her into trying pot one lazy afternoon in his dorm room when it’s just the two of them with nothing but time. She does and doesn’t bother to tell him it’s not her first time (she thinks of Jeff and shudders at fading memories long past) and coughs as she takes the first drag. Sara remembers why she never liked it before; feels sick as the usual lucidness that accompanies her life fades away into a distorted haze. Sara likes clarity, feeds of it, and hates not being able to list all the elements of the periodic table and swears she’ll never do it again.
Only she does, because Griffith asks and it’s there and really, what was the harm anyway?
There’s an incident her junior year involving a speeding ticket and open liquor bottles and a bag of pot hidden in the trunk. They’re arrested, and she’s so mortified that she throws up on the side of the road all over her shoes, and all she can do is watch her entire future flash before her eyes and slip out of her shaking hands. When they give Sara a chance to make her one phone call she’s caught in a weak moment. She doesn’t know who else to call so she calls her father.
There’s bribery (she’s sure of it) and promises of rehabilitation, a hefty donation to the school and Sara and Griffith are let of the hook. No one even thinks twice about it. Her father looks at her with something reminiscent of complete and utter disappointment and it almost, almost bothers her. The Sunday afternoon phone calls become few and far between. Sara and Griffith go their separate ways and that does bother her, but he flunks out later that year anyway.
Northwestern is challenging, but all together not that hard because she’s smart, always has been, and she doesn’t have to work as hard as most people because things just click into place for her. She has that ambition that drives her faster and farther than everyone else. The biology and chemistry and memorization of this procedure and the place and shape of the 206 bones in the body comes easy. Her people skills need work, but she doesn’t let that deter her and by the time she graduates and enters med school she has the friendliness down pat.
Her father never makes it to her graduation.
[five]
Three years into med school, almost a year into interning at Chicago General and Sara hasn’t had a drink in months, hasn’t touched a drug in years. She smokes like a chimney, but it’s better than the alternative, and somewhere along the line she finally realizes that if she wanted to do this whole doctor thing, and do it right, she had to stop being such a hypocrite. Sara starts to clean up her messes (old and new) instead of drinking them away and it refreshes her. Gives her a fresh start that she clings to like a lifeline.
Jason walks into her life on a cold as death night in October at a birthday party for an old friend from college. Med school is almost over and she is deathly afraid of what might come next, but she is trying to push forward and not look back. Jason is blonde, cute. He gives her a look from across the crowded room that keeps her warm all night.
He offers to buy her a drink and despite the fact that she hasn’t had one in almost a year, she obliges. Sara hasn’t talked to her father in months, hasn’t had person to person interaction (other then patient/doctor) in weeks and she is tired of feeling alone. Tired of being alone. She hasn’t had a boyfriend since college and she has never been one to have an abundance of friends. She has herself convinced that she doesn’t need anyone, but has this innate need to feel needed. There is a void in her life that she can’t seem to figure out how to fill despite the fact that she’s been desperately trying for what seems like forever.
Jason tells her a stupid joke and she laughs anyway. Is so enthralled by the attention he is giving her, by the companionship he is offering her. Her hand shakes with anticipation as he hands her the wine glass, but it tastes glorious and the alcohol warms her to the core. She orders another drink, a scotch this time, and before she even realizes what is happening they’re back at his rundown apartment a tangled mess of sweaty limbs and labored breaths.
It’s a mistake, but making mistakes is something Sara has always been better than good at, and as she lays there and watches him smoke her last cigarette she finds that following old patterns is so much easier than trying so hard to create new ones.
“So,” Jason begins, letting out a puff of smoke into the already stiflingly stale air. “You work at a hospital, right?”
Sara doesn’t see the error in her ways until it is too late.
[six]
She hides it well at first. No one notices her unexplained absences, her grouchy moods, her frailness because she is an addict, always has been, always will be, and she knows how to hide it. It’s controlled. She is always in control -- cool, calm controlled Sara. It was just a few drinks here and there; not every day after work, just some. She’d decline wine at dinner with Jason most of the time, and when she did have a drink it was usually just one. She had it under control.
Jason doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care, because he’s one too and she provides the morphine and syringes and he loves her for it. Sara exists in such a constant, altered state of mind that she’s convinced that that is okay.
Then she starts screwing up on the job. She starts forgetting which bone is which. What the symptoms are for this illness or that disease. She misdiagnoses and scrambles to fix her errors before everyone notices. Sara is constantly playing catch-up to cover up her mistakes and the needle in her arm is a refreshing release at the end of the day, during the day, in-between patients.
“We did the best we could,” Sara would say to a young wife when her husband died during her watch.
It’s how they taught her in Medical School, it’s how she’s been doing it for what feels like forever: not filled with emotion, but not emotionless. She’d watch as the young girl would stare at her in disbelief, or worse an older woman would loose her footing and stumble, stare, opened mouth up at her as if she held all the power. She doesn’t, she realizes now. She’s lived her life for so many years thinking she could save everyone, that she held all the answers, that she was in control. But she isn’t and she never has been.
There’s the kid hit by the car in the street and she is so fucking high she can barely see straight and there are people, frantic strangers asking her, begging her to help and she can’t even figure out what to do. She’s stuck, stationary, is it move them to make them comfortable? Don’t move them? She can’t even remember how to perform CPR and she falls, gracelessly to her knees, the impact jarring her into the harsh reality around her.
The boy is dying and she can do nothing but watch, wide-eyed, hands over her mouth in horror as the threadbare string that was holding her life together frays and her world hits the concrete around her, shattering into a million pieces that she’ll never be able to put back together.
[seven]
Sara gives up the drugs, the booze, the cigarettes. She resigns from her job at the hospital (she likes to stress the fact that she resigned because it sounds so much better than being fired) and checks herself into rehab. Detoxes. Drinks nothing but the apple juice they give her and a few bites every now and then of the bland mush they throw on a plate and try to pass off as food. She goes to meetings, talks about her feelings. Sees a shrink every day at three o’clock on the dot. She gets better.
Jason is long gone -- from Chicago, from her life -- and the clarity that she is accompanied with now tells her that it’s a good thing. She spends her days dreaming of cigarettes and chocolate… of scotch and her fingers itch to feel that needle in between her fingers, the tumbler in her hand.
The track marks on her pale arms serve as constant reminders -- of what she had been, of what she had done, of a past she is trying desperately to rectify -- and when her father comes to visit her once, the only time he ever does, his eyes travel to the marks on her arm, then to her eyes, his own void of any emotion besides disappointment. They beat around the bush -- talk about the upcoming elections, the weather, anything but the problem at hand. His eyes keep traveling back to her arms, eyeing the scars that she wears as a stigma, and she knows he sees it as some sort of judgment on him. She refuses to put on a jacket.
“I just… don’t understand. You could have anything you ever wanted out of life,” she quietly snorts at that and crosses her arms over her chest. “Why did you do this to yourself, Sara?”
“My shrink says it has something to do with having a fucked up childhood, but what the hell does he know?” She deadpans. She’s not supposed to be angry, but she gives herself this, because it is so much easier than letting go.
Her father’s shoulders fall and he looks just about ready to smack her. “You can’t blame this on me.”
“No, you’re right,” she concedes, because she can’t and she knows it. “I stuck that needle in my arm.” Sara’s mind swarms with memories -- spending birthdays waiting for him, cards stamped with his signature, hiding in her room covering her ears in a desperate attempt to block out the angry tones of arguments -- and a place inside of her aches. “But I can’t help but wonder if you would have stopped me.”
Her father opens his mouth, but shuts it immediately and stares at her in disbelief. He looks hurt, devastated, and a part of her is proud. The other (bigger) part of her hurts too -- for what they could have had, for what they don’t have, for the broken relationship they do have.
When he goes to kiss her forehead as he says goodbye, she flinches, but does not move away.
[eight]
After rehab she moves out of her nice apartment into a not so nice one. She spends days re-painting, weeks arranging furniture. She goes to meetings every day. Drinks tea instead of coffee. Buys a plant. She has no idea what she wants to do with her life, no idea if she is ready to do anything with her life again. She volunteers at shelters, does humanitarian work. She calls her father every once in a while and tries not to get upset when his secretary says he’s too busy to talk to her.
She has wanted to be a doctor for as long as she can remember. She wants to help people, and when she thinks she is ready to start working again, Fox River comes out of nowhere and she decides that it is as good a place as any to start over again. Her father is unhappy, but she stopped trying long ago to please him and is finally trying to do something to please herself. Sara works hard at saving those men because deep down she thinks it will help redeem her. To make up for that boy, for those people who may have lost their lives because of her mistakes.
The scars on her arms fade as she slowly puts the mess that was her life back together. She grows accustomed to wearing long sleeves. Some days she runs her fingers over the marks she can barely see, but knows are there and remembers. Katie is a welcomed sight and the first real friend she’s had in years. She doesn’t date, just goes home to her empty apartment and waters her plant.
Weeks melt into months, seasons change and so does she and Sara will always remember that April as the hottest on record, but also because it is when Michael Scofield strolls into her carefully-put-back-together life and tosses it upside down again.
[nine]
Sara takes to Michael because he seems relatively innocent in a sea of murderers and rapists and people who did things she can not even begin to imagine to get thrown into Fox River. He’s educated and handsome, they practically lived in the same neighborhood and there is something about him that doesn’t quite fit. He seems relieved when she tells him about the diabetes, he shows up missing two toes not even a week inside. Something inside Sara nags at her and she knows he doesn’t belong there.
He saves her during the riot, his arm reaching down for hers and she grabs on to it like it is her salvation. He risks his life for hers and it is almost enough to make up for the fact that he lied to her about things like toxic mold removal and Lincoln Burrows being his brother. Michael is charming and sweet and there is flirting and conversations about Baja and fifty cent beers and later, innocent touches, stolen moments that make her blush make something swim gloriously deep inside of her. He makes her a paper flower for her birthday and she carries it around with her all day, covets it like it is the holy grail.
There's something there, between them, and it's palpable enough to leave her hoping for something more, but just like everything else in her life the hope falls short of reality. He’s married and the betrayal that slices through her like a knife at that revelation is enough to make her back away. She refuses to be that woman.
There is a desperate request, information about Lincoln’s case that just doesn’t add up. Conspiracies, murders and she goes to her father and pleads Lincoln’s case half because she believes it all and half just because Michael asks her too. Questions surround him that she desperately wants, needs answers to, but can’t find. He promises her that they are there and she thinks foolishly that one day he will tell her.
Sara’s interest in him crosses the borders of patient/doctor and into something forbidden. She thinks about him in ways that she shouldn’t, obsesses over the way he looks at her, the way his fingers feel against the skin of her wrist. And suddenly she realizes that she has fallen for him.
Michael’s lips on hers and he kisses her, tearing her apart with just a mere brush of his lips and she lets him.
“What do you want from me, Michael?” she asks, breathless.
“It won’t always be like this,” his hands on her cheeks, soft, his voice choked with emotion and her knees buckle. A shiver runs up her spine. Her breath catches in her throat, she can’t breathe, can’t move.
Sara believes him.
[ten]
A day later and everything’s gone to hell. He lied to her. Betrayed her. Stole her keys and for what? Drugs? Needles? She wonders if all he’s ever told her were lies and she feels foolish and so ridiculously stupid for believing he was different, that they had something. He tells her that he and his brother are escaping. Michael asks her to make a mistake, to leave the door unlocked. Sara realizes that she was just a part of one, big master plan and she isn’t quite sure what hurts more: the betrayal or the blatant possibility that he never cared about her at all.
Suddenly she’s back to where she was three years ago, her life rapidly falling apart and she, seemingly powerless to stop it. Her father’s running for the Vice Presidency and didn’t tell her and is possibly mixed up in something that is bigger than all of them combined. She wants a drink, a cigarette, drugs. She doesn’t want to be her anymore.
Maybe she does it because she’s pissed at her father, because she knows deep down that Lincoln is innocent, because Michael asked her. Or maybe she does it because she is just, so, so good at making mistakes. Either way, she leaves the door open and watches, once again, only this time with crystal clarity, as her life collapses around her.
When she returns home she drinks an entire bottle of scotch, rolls the small bottle of morphine in-between her fingers, staring at it as if it held all the answers to her questions. The needle is cool against her flesh and she winces slightly as it pierces her skin. She shakes as she breathes in the high and closes her eyes. In her final moments of clarity she thinks of her father, of Michael, of all the things she has done, all of the things she has left undone.
She wishes for things so impossible.
[eleven]
When she wakes the pristine white walls of the hospital room and the smell of antiseptic are almost comforting. Nurses look at her like she’s a miracle; Sara begs to differ. The Feds are there to question her, treating her as if she is as bad as the men she helped escape. The fact that men like Abruzzi and T-Bag are out on the loose because of her, because of her mistake, makes her stomach lurch violently. It’s number 157 of her list of reasons why she should hate Michael Scofield. Her father refuses to see her, she’s lost her job and when they arrest her she knows it’s a part of her penance.
Her lawyer is a relatively short, slightly balding man who wears bowties instead of neckties. He’s cute in that old man sort of way. He’s from a firm she vaguely recognizes -- the type that charge you an arm and a leg for a mere hour, and she knows he’s here on her father’s command. Despite the fact that her dirty hair is plastered to her face and she’s been sitting in a cell for two days, the sight of this man pacifies her. Then, he looks at her with disgust, brandishing his perfectly capped teeth and she shivers. The world is as disgusted with her as she is with herself.
Sara spends days shaking off the Mahone, going over her story a thousand times in her head, so she has it memorized, down pat and when they ask her to go over it again and again the facts never change. Michael and Lincoln are long gone and she doesn’t know why it is so hard for them to accept that. They release her, the charges are dropped and she returns to her apartment to clean up vomit and throw out empty liquor bottles. She goes to meetings. Stays clean. Every time she turns on the TV there is a news report about the Fox River Eight, his face. Sara stops watching.
Her father winds up dead a week later -- the press claim suicide and slander his name with false notions about political scandals, but Sara refuses to believe it. She finally realizes what she should have months (a lifetime) before: she can’t trust anyone.
[thirteen]
A few days after her father’s death she starts to see the men in nondescript cars, in suits and dark sunglasses every place she goes. At her meetings, at the grocery store, outside of her apartment building. They’re everywhere and the sudden realization that she could very well be their next target slams through her like a ton of bricks. She is constantly looking over her shoulder, checking every room, under every table when she enters her apartment. Locks her doors and windows and checks them twice. She can’t stop worrying long enough to figure out what it is she should do.
She returns one night from the corner market to an apartment that is colder than she left it. She sets down her groceries on the nearest table, turns up the thermostat and reaches for the light switch.
“Don’t turn on the light,” Michael’s voice cuts through her like steel and she spins on her heel, the keys in her hand clattering to the floor. She can barely make out of his outline sitting in a chair far away to the side, nearest to an open window.
Wind wafts through the apartment and runs right through her.
“How the hell did you get in here?” she whispers, taking one, single step closer.
Squinting, she watches him shrug and stand. She takes a step back, he pauses in his movements. She breathes in deeply and swears she can smell him from all the way across the room -- all soap and sweat and that essence that just is Michael.
“Sara --”
“You shouldn’t be here, Michael. You should go, now. Before they see you.”
Michael doesn’t say anything for a beat and she reaches to turn on the light but stops herself. “You need to get out of the city.”
She laughs mirthlessly. “Where the hell do you suppose I go? Huh?” she takes a few angry steps forward until she is a foot away from him. If she squints hard enough she can make out the angles of his face, the sharpness of his cheekbones. She wishes she could see his eyes. “They’re investigating my dead father, they froze his assets. I have no job. No money.”
“I know that,” he sounds tired and he’s trying placate her and she hates it.
“I bet you do,” the resentment in her tone surprises even her.
“I never meant --”
She cuts him off. “I. Don’t. Care. I really don’t. You lied to me, so what, I’m over it. Just do me a favor and get the hell out of here before you get me into even more trouble than I already am.”
There is silence, he says nothing and all she can hear is the sound of her heart beating in her ears and she counts his breaths and tries to ignore the way he’s staring at her as though he can see right through her.
“It wasn't supposed to turn out like this, Sara.”
“I don’t believe you,” she whispers because she honestly doesn’t know what to believe anymore.
Michael takes a step forward and she foolishly lets him. “I never meant to involve you in this.”
“I don’t believe you,” she tells him again.
“You have to trust me, Sara,” he says quietly, his hand tentatively reaching out, his fingers grasping her wrist lightly. She’s weak, and she hates it, but she leans into his touch.
He’s pulling at her heartstrings, at her emotions and she wants so badly to give up and just go with it, but she can’t. There’s too much between them. She pulls away.
“If there is one thing you taught me, Michael, it is that you can’t trust anyone.”
Sara can see him flinch in the darkness and ignores the tug at her heart when he moves away. Something in the room shifts -- his mood, her willingness to hate him -- and when he speaks again his voice is cool and controlled, masked. She’s glad she can’t see his face clearly.
“The people who framed Lincoln, Sara, they killed your father. They know you helped me. They know you’re apart of this. They are going to kill you too.”
She wants to yell at him, throw something at him. She wants to tell him that it’s her fault she’s in this mess even though she knows it’s only half true. She wants to jump him and kiss him and slap him across the face all at the same time. She’s scared of what he’s saying because she’s known it all along and she hates him for saying it out loud. Sara is being pulled in so many different directions that she feels like she’s about to come apart at the seams.
Taking a deep breath in an effort to calm her nerves she rubs her temples and tries, but ultimately fails, not to panic.
“Get on a plane. Go to Baja. You’ll know what to do from there.”
Michael sounds so clear, so certain and all Sara can do is stare at him like he’s lost his mind and wonder if this too was a part of the big master plan.
“They are watching my every move, Michael!” She all but screams hysterically. “They’re outside right now. I can’t even charge a coffee from Starbucks without them knowing it.”
He takes a step forward, invades what little personal space she has left and frames her face in his hands. She too tired to fight it, to exhausted from everything, and she leans into his touch, her eyes closing, and she can taste the wistful sigh on the tip of her tongue, fighting to be released.
“You have to trust me, Sara. You will die if you don’t, do you get that?” He’s shaking her violently, his hands on her face in an almost bruising grip and it jars her eyes open. “This was never about just you and me, it has always been bigger than that.”
Sara wants to push him away, to tell him she doesn’t, can’t trust anyone because of him. Instead she acts impulsively, leans up and forcefully brushes her lips against his. She wants to show him that she has the upper hand, that she is in control (even though that notion is so far beyond lunacy it’s quite hilarious) but most of all she wants to be reminded, wants to know that at least this part of their relationship was real.
The line between the lies and reality was so badly blurred and Sara just wants, needs to know where she stands.
It takes him a second to react, but he does, his hands moving to her hair, hers winding around his neck. His lips move against hers furiously, his body flush against hers wonderfully and it steals the breath right out of her.
“I hate you,” her words are a breath of a whisper against his lips and they both know she doesn’t mean it. Michael kisses her harder, deeper, desperately and she swears she can feel her toes curl. There’s a promise of something more laced underneath the kiss, and as his hands untangle themselves from her hair and he slowly moves away, Sara can’t help but wonder if that promise is a lie too.
A kiss to her forehead then, “just trust me, Sara. Please.”
When she finally collects herself and opens her eyes moments (possibly minutes?) later, he’s gone. She feels empty, alone. She calls out for him, but there is no answer, no proof that he was even there except for an open window and a lone post card on a side table. Fingers trace over the picture of a small town in Panama and shake as she flips the card over. I’m sorry is hastily scrawled on the back and she lets a tiny piece of herself forgive him before she crumbles the card and throws it into the trash.
[fourteen]
A few days later when she can’t sleep, she stands by the window in her room and watches the city beneath her as she sips lukewarm tea. That same car with that same man is parked across the street and she eyes it warily. She can taste Michael’s kiss on her lips, can feel his hands on her skin, his skin under her fingertips. Her heart aches in way she has become entirely too used to. She frantically digs the post card out of the trash.
“I‘m sorry.”
The floor creaks and she jumps, clutching the crinkled post card against her chest as her heart hammers against her ribcage.
Sara knows what she has to do.
[fifteen]
A plane ride (courtesy of Miranda Higgens, a woman who will report her AmEx card stolen a few hours too late) a long car ride, hitch hiking, days and more than a few countries later and Sara, equipped with lighter and shorter hair, crosses the border into Panama. She is huddled in the back of an old rust bucket truck with nothing but the clothes on her back, a pair of cheap sunglasses that are too big for her face, and a duffel bag filled with clothes and a few remembrances of her former life. A small town comes into view and Sara sighs with relief when the ancient buildings and architecture matches the crinkled and fading postcard clutched in her hand.
The clouds threaten to burst above her and the moment seems somewhat anticlimactic. She was expecting beaches, sun and cloudless skies and instead she gets rain and thunder and she’s wearing the same clothes she’s been wearing for almost a week. It almost disappoints her, but Sara realizes that this is her life and when has anything ever gone smoothly for her?
There are a million and one reasons why she shouldn’t be there, but all she keeps thinking was the one reason why she should. She has nothing left in Chicago. Her father is dead. Her mother has been dead for years; her career is over. If she had stayed, she was only biding her time until they killed her too. She is angry with Michael for more reasons that she can count on her fingers and toes, but a part of her still (albeit rather foolishly) trusts him. Sara knows that’s better than nothing.
Stuffing the postcard into her back pocket, Sara gets out at a small port in even smaller town, fumbles her Spanish as she says thank-you and enters the hustle and bustle of the mob of locals. People are pulling her in all different directions, and she says excuse me in a language that is going to take some getting used to and pushes the strap of her duffel bag more securely on her shoulder. She looks very much the part of the tourist she is trying to play looks frantically around for a familiar face, for his face and can barely contain the smile on her lips when she sees Michael across the way staring right in her direction.
Sara thinks, briefly, that it feels a little too easy -- finding him here after a week-long journey with nothing but a picture on a postcard as her compass. But he is there, waiting for her, and the sight alone tells her that she should probably just stop thinking. Instead, she smiles and gives an awkward half wave. He smiles back.
Thunder crackles above them and people scatter to safe harbor as it takes moments (minutes, hours, she can’t differentiate, but it feels like forever) until he is finally standing before her. Neither one of them say anything, they just breathe in the moment, each other. It makes her nervous. He makes her nervous -- all clean and kempt before the filthy mess that she is. She pushes her dirty hair behind her ear, picks at the fraying edges of her grubby t-shirt and avoids eye contact.
“Is Lincoln--”
“Yeah.”
Michael smiles and so does she. They take a step forward at the same time. His hand reaches out, but stops, and she takes a chance, acts without thinking and grabs his hand, their fingers intertwining perfectly, like they are meant to fit together. It feels so incredibly right, so perfect and as the rain begins to fall she knows she has made the right choice.
“Thank you,” he whispers and leans in; his fingers trace her cheek softly. For what, she wonders. Leaving the door unlocked? Meeting him here?
Sara smiles back. “I didn’t do it for you.”
Michael’s lips ease over hers slowly, leisurely. He’s drawing out the moment and she’s making a memory in her mind. They feel different now, his kisses. They make her feel more mushy, more hungry. Less desolate and more complete. Sara’s heart aches in a way she’s fond of and she takes this moment and stores it in her mind, wraps her arms around him and just breathes.
Breathes in the salty sea air, the rain, this moment, him.
It is the closest thing to absolution that Sara will ever get and she clings to it as desperately as she is clinging to Michael and finally, she allows herself to heal.
End.