Prison Break - Story of Faith (5/27)
Title: Story of Faith (5/27) - Story index
Author: clair-de-lune
Fandom: Prison Break
Characters: Michael, Sara, Lincoln, Paul Kellerman, Sofia Lugo, Jane Phillips, Michael Jr., LJ Burrows, Original characters
Pairings: Michael/Sara, Lincoln/Sofia (background)
Categories: Gen, romance
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~ 2.230 (this chapter), ~ 60.500 (total)
Author’s notes: This is canon compliant and a fix-it story. In other words, I tried to take into account most of the canon, including The Final Break, and give it a different ending. See chapter one for thanks and beta-readers.
Summary: He had thought that death was black. Dark, at the very least. It was dark at first, after the fireworks he’d created had subsided and their imprints on his retinas had faded. After that, though, there were colors.
After Miami Dade, while Sara, Lincoln and Sofia settle in Costa Rica and try to build a new life, Michael awakes far away from them... (Post-series, canon compliant, fix-it story)
Chapter 5
The bungalow was neat and clean, roof, floors and walls as good as new, and a faint scent of fresh paint still in the air when Sara entered it for the first time with Michael Jr. in her arms. Lincoln and LJ had hammered the last nails in the day before; Sofia had stacked the fridge with fruits, vegetables, and more food than Sara could eat. The place was ready for him. She was ready for him.
(Hopefully.)
She hadn’t pushed for or insisted that the clinic let her go home early. Quite the contrary. She dreaded the moment where she would be alone, sitting by herself with too much on her mind, only the memories of Michael and a ‘could-have-been, should-have-been’ little tune playing in her head to keep her company.
It didn’t happen the way she’d imagined.
For five days, she slept and showered when Michael Jr. allowed her to. She ate when he was done with his meal which, by the way, was the only moment where she did sit. Any other second was spent up on her feet or collapsed across her bed, no in-between.
On the morning of the sixth day, she gave Lincoln a call - Lincoln who’d asked her, “You sure you don’t want any help?” and to whom she’d replied, “I’ll be just fine.”
He was good with babies, that was plainly obvious and she told him so.
“Been there, done that,” he said with a shrug.
He didn’t fool her. He’d been there, done that once about seventeen years ago. He was just good with babies. His hands were huge under the tiny head of the infant and yet so nimble and fast when said infant needed to have his diaper changed.
“Didn’t they show you how to do it at the clinic?” he asked her, and then added, “I thought you were a doctor, anyway.”
He was a bit too sarcastic for his own good, but it wasn’t like she could blow him off now. Moreover, it was fascinating how hands looking like oversized paws managed to handle and master the tiny fastenings. She wasn’t sure she wanted to find out where he’d picked up such dexterity besides taking care of his own kid, but it was interesting to watch.
“My training in pediatrics lasted two months ten years ago and I don’t even know why you imagine it covered this kind of thing,” she replied. “Anyway, I haven’t practiced medicine for months, and the last time I had patients, they were convicts in a federal prison. Let me tell you something about convicts in a federal prison, Lincoln-”
“Sure, go ahead, ‘cause I don’t know anything about them.”
“They’re not the kind of people you want to see in a diaper.”
He had to concede on that one.
She glanced at Michael, who had fallen asleep as soon as Lincoln had settled him in the crook of his left elbow.
“He likes you,” she told him.
“He’s a baby. You feed him, you clean him, you change his diaper, he likes you. You love him, he loves you back.”
That was true. He was a nice, easy baby. Stubborn but quiet. Hungry and eating enthusiastically. Maybe a bit squirmy when it came to diaper-time.
“Mike was a pain in the ass,” Linc grumbled pensively. “He didn’t cry, but he didn’t fall asleep until he’d had what he wanted.”
And just like that, Sara - who hadn’t cried since she set foot in Costa Rica and hadn’t sat since she left the clinic except to feed Michael - watched her baby snoring softly against the white tee-shirt of her brother-in-law, sat on the couch and let the tears pricking her eyes slide down her cheeks.
“Shit... Sara...”
“I’m okay.”
She was not. But at least she was not okay in an okay way for the first time in a long time. Lincoln sat in a cane armchair that creaked under his weight, cradled Michael, and waited.
She cried for Michael Jr. who would have to rely on testimonials like the one Lincoln just provided to know his father; she cried for Michael who wasn’t there and for Lincoln who was here but shouldn’t have been here that way; for LJ just because; for Sofia who was alone at the scuba shop because Lincoln had to leave her to come here; and while she was at it, she cried for herself.
Lincoln settled in the guest room for the night and, the next morning, cooked them pancakes. She thought of their discussion a few months ago, how this thing they had was supposed to be quid pro quo, and how fucking much this was not quid pro quo for now.
She slept, ate the pancakes, and decided she’d do quid pro quo later.
* * *
Michael got a picture of his newborn son for free.
No need to work on and solve an orange, red or any other color file. Mrs. Jamison laid the pic on his desk herself, and when he looked up in surprise, she merely shrugged.
“Don’t go around pretending that I don’t have a heart, Mr. Scofield,” she said.
He didn’t bother studying her face and looking for evidence that she was telling - or not telling - the truth. He had something better to focus on.
He tried to focus on it, anyway. His eyes moistened, a lump swelled in his throat, and before he knew it, he was actually-fucking-crying. He couldn’t bring himself to touch the photo so it lay here on his desk, where it shouldn’t have been, in the middle of files screaming guilt and ugliness when his son was all innocence and hope.
Never before had he felt so acutely that you could be filled with emptiness and longing. Sure, he’d experienced it quite a few times because of Linc - in a memorable way even - and with Sara too. But now? The ache, the absence of Sara and the baby, carved its place within him. He feared he shrank down, collapsed around that empty place; it couldn’t happen, he couldn’t let it happen, not if he wanted to see his family again one day.
The baby. Michael. Michael Scofield Jr. Michael Scofield-Tancredi. Michael Tancredi-Scofield. He tested the various combinations, the various possibilities, in his mind. Sara had named their baby - their baby, except that she was alone to raise him, alone with Linc and Sofia’s help, LJ, Sucre and even Mahone: everyone but his father - Michael. It made him so happy and so devastated at the same time
(He tried to picture Lincoln’s reaction had Michael Sr. - he was a ‘Sr.’ now - been around. The teasing about naming his kid after himself and not doing better in that respect than his big brother. The image was meant to keep the wave of emotion in check, and it failed miserably at this task.)
Jamison looked up at the ceiling to give him the time collect himself - and he couldn’t say if it required minutes, hours, or the rest of the day.
“Was it Yoki’s request? The pic?” he asked eventually. It looked like Yoki to be, or seem to be, that thoughtful.
“Possibly,” Jamison admitted gruffly, “but I could have refused.” Then, her voice sounding almost nice and warm despite its strain: “He’s beautiful.”
The photo had been taken only a few hours after the baby was born. He was a bundle of pinkish and wrinkled flesh wrapped in a white cloth, with a few rashes on his cheeks and forehead, and a small mouth pinched in discontentment to have been pulled away from his mother’s breast for some odd guy to take his picture. At this stage, you had to be his mother or his father, or at least very close family, to find him beautiful.
Obviously, short of Sara - and not by much - he was the most perfect human being Michael had ever seen.
He gazed at the picture every night before going to sleep, studied it to the point that he could have drawn by memory each single detail. The creases of Sara’s gown, the curve of her swollen breast, the protective curl of her fingers around the small head. The white diaper of Michael Jr., the way his tiny nose wrinkled, the delicate nails. The hint of a huge hand right at the top right corner of the image, a hand that had to be Lincoln’s. The teddy bear dressed in a blue checked jumpsuit lying on Sara’s lap.
The teddy bear became an obsession. Something he thought about when he gazed at the picture, when he pinned it back to the wall, when he woke up in the morning, when he walked to his office and when he exercised at the gym. The teddy bear was one of the first of many things he wouldn’t have been able to give to his son himself.
And it was bad; he knew what obsessions could do to him.
He could be - become - anything to cater to an obsession. He could be smart, strong, purposefully weak, he could be cunning, threatening, manipulative. He could cheat and lie, feel awful about it, but do it nonetheless because it had to be done. Even more so when it concerned something as important as this baby he’d never held in his arms.
He could be anything.
He could be charming.
He hadn’t really tried to be charming since he’d been here; maybe a couple of times with Yoki, but Yoki responded to charm when she wanted to, hinting that his attempts were, in the end, useless.
In the lunchroom of The Foundation, under Yoki’s interested scrutiny, he offered Mrs. Jamison a black coffee - no cream, no sugar, obviously - a smirk and velvety words, snarky but flattering in a quirky way. He offered Mrs. Jamison a challenge because he couldn’t win her over, but he could charm her by eventually letting her have the upper hand. He had a hunch she was the kind of woman who liked to come out on top. He said this last bit aloud and she tipped her head to the side, smiled back at him over her coffee.
It wasn’t the smile of someone who had been charmed.
“Mr. Scofield,” she began in a too reasonable tone. “I can tell that you want something. If you want something, you ask me for it. Straight. If I can give it to you, I will. If I can’t, I won’t. It’s as simple as that. Don’t try to manipulate me, don’t try to fool me, don’t try to woo me. I’m too old and too cynical for you.”
She got up, and he understood that when she told him he should ask for what he wanted, she didn’t mean here and now. She meant on her own terms.
“I am not Sara Tancredi,” she added coldly. “The door here is already open and I don’t care whether you walk through it or not. My contract with Kellerman doesn’t include keeping you captive.”
(They had made this point quite clear, both of them. He was an escape artist: he was here willingly and they were not going to waste time and energy trying to keep him in.)
It hit him in the guts, the backlash, the harshness of the comeback and how Sara would have been entitled to throw something similarly merciless in his face. He’d thought it countless times, but hearing it had a weirdly cathartic quality. He held on to the edges of the table and tried to breathe.
Jamison walked out, but he barely paid attention to her departure. From afar, he could hear Yoki telling him, almost apologizing for her boss, “She’s not a total jerk. She just-”
“I don’t think she is one,” he replied honestly.
And since Mrs. Jamison’s ‘own terms’ implied walking to her office, sitting on the other side of her desk, and waiting for the questions that have to be asked at some point, he did exactly that. He’d done harder things for weirder reasons; it wasn’t an issue to abide by her requirements.
“I want to send a stuffed toy to my son,” he told her the instant she looked up from her computer.
At least, the incident would have given him the small satisfaction of seeing her squint in surprise - she hadn’t seen it coming. He wondered what she’d imagined, what kind of grand scheme she thought he had in mind.
She didn’t ask any questions, though.
“He has nothing from me,” he elaborated. “Of course Sara can’t know it comes from me, but it could be a complimentary gift from some store where she shops or-”
“You have been giving it some thought, haven’t you?” Jamison interrupted him.
He shrugged. “I thought I’d better come prepared.”
“Yes, I’ve heard it’s a pattern of yours.”
She didn’t give him an answer, no yes or no and even less a maybe. She wasn’t a ‘maybe’ kind of woman. But two days later, Tom handed him over a toy catalogue.
“Mrs. Jamison said no smartass move, Sir. Don’t try to pass them a message.”
Yes, he’d figured. No message - his balls, her breakfast, etc. Gotcha. As if, with him supposed to be dead and them logically convinced that he was dead, anything could have passed for a message.
He chose a white duck with a green hat and matching bow-tie.
TBC
Previous / next chapters
--Comments are always welcome and very much appreciated :)
Author: clair-de-lune
Fandom: Prison Break
Characters: Michael, Sara, Lincoln, Paul Kellerman, Sofia Lugo, Jane Phillips, Michael Jr., LJ Burrows, Original characters
Pairings: Michael/Sara, Lincoln/Sofia (background)
Categories: Gen, romance
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~ 2.230 (this chapter), ~ 60.500 (total)
Author’s notes: This is canon compliant and a fix-it story. In other words, I tried to take into account most of the canon, including The Final Break, and give it a different ending. See chapter one for thanks and beta-readers.
Summary: He had thought that death was black. Dark, at the very least. It was dark at first, after the fireworks he’d created had subsided and their imprints on his retinas had faded. After that, though, there were colors.
After Miami Dade, while Sara, Lincoln and Sofia settle in Costa Rica and try to build a new life, Michael awakes far away from them... (Post-series, canon compliant, fix-it story)
Chapter 5
The bungalow was neat and clean, roof, floors and walls as good as new, and a faint scent of fresh paint still in the air when Sara entered it for the first time with Michael Jr. in her arms. Lincoln and LJ had hammered the last nails in the day before; Sofia had stacked the fridge with fruits, vegetables, and more food than Sara could eat. The place was ready for him. She was ready for him.
(Hopefully.)
She hadn’t pushed for or insisted that the clinic let her go home early. Quite the contrary. She dreaded the moment where she would be alone, sitting by herself with too much on her mind, only the memories of Michael and a ‘could-have-been, should-have-been’ little tune playing in her head to keep her company.
It didn’t happen the way she’d imagined.
For five days, she slept and showered when Michael Jr. allowed her to. She ate when he was done with his meal which, by the way, was the only moment where she did sit. Any other second was spent up on her feet or collapsed across her bed, no in-between.
On the morning of the sixth day, she gave Lincoln a call - Lincoln who’d asked her, “You sure you don’t want any help?” and to whom she’d replied, “I’ll be just fine.”
He was good with babies, that was plainly obvious and she told him so.
“Been there, done that,” he said with a shrug.
He didn’t fool her. He’d been there, done that once about seventeen years ago. He was just good with babies. His hands were huge under the tiny head of the infant and yet so nimble and fast when said infant needed to have his diaper changed.
“Didn’t they show you how to do it at the clinic?” he asked her, and then added, “I thought you were a doctor, anyway.”
He was a bit too sarcastic for his own good, but it wasn’t like she could blow him off now. Moreover, it was fascinating how hands looking like oversized paws managed to handle and master the tiny fastenings. She wasn’t sure she wanted to find out where he’d picked up such dexterity besides taking care of his own kid, but it was interesting to watch.
“My training in pediatrics lasted two months ten years ago and I don’t even know why you imagine it covered this kind of thing,” she replied. “Anyway, I haven’t practiced medicine for months, and the last time I had patients, they were convicts in a federal prison. Let me tell you something about convicts in a federal prison, Lincoln-”
“Sure, go ahead, ‘cause I don’t know anything about them.”
“They’re not the kind of people you want to see in a diaper.”
He had to concede on that one.
She glanced at Michael, who had fallen asleep as soon as Lincoln had settled him in the crook of his left elbow.
“He likes you,” she told him.
“He’s a baby. You feed him, you clean him, you change his diaper, he likes you. You love him, he loves you back.”
That was true. He was a nice, easy baby. Stubborn but quiet. Hungry and eating enthusiastically. Maybe a bit squirmy when it came to diaper-time.
“Mike was a pain in the ass,” Linc grumbled pensively. “He didn’t cry, but he didn’t fall asleep until he’d had what he wanted.”
And just like that, Sara - who hadn’t cried since she set foot in Costa Rica and hadn’t sat since she left the clinic except to feed Michael - watched her baby snoring softly against the white tee-shirt of her brother-in-law, sat on the couch and let the tears pricking her eyes slide down her cheeks.
“Shit... Sara...”
“I’m okay.”
She was not. But at least she was not okay in an okay way for the first time in a long time. Lincoln sat in a cane armchair that creaked under his weight, cradled Michael, and waited.
She cried for Michael Jr. who would have to rely on testimonials like the one Lincoln just provided to know his father; she cried for Michael who wasn’t there and for Lincoln who was here but shouldn’t have been here that way; for LJ just because; for Sofia who was alone at the scuba shop because Lincoln had to leave her to come here; and while she was at it, she cried for herself.
Lincoln settled in the guest room for the night and, the next morning, cooked them pancakes. She thought of their discussion a few months ago, how this thing they had was supposed to be quid pro quo, and how fucking much this was not quid pro quo for now.
She slept, ate the pancakes, and decided she’d do quid pro quo later.
* * *
Michael got a picture of his newborn son for free.
No need to work on and solve an orange, red or any other color file. Mrs. Jamison laid the pic on his desk herself, and when he looked up in surprise, she merely shrugged.
“Don’t go around pretending that I don’t have a heart, Mr. Scofield,” she said.
He didn’t bother studying her face and looking for evidence that she was telling - or not telling - the truth. He had something better to focus on.
He tried to focus on it, anyway. His eyes moistened, a lump swelled in his throat, and before he knew it, he was actually-fucking-crying. He couldn’t bring himself to touch the photo so it lay here on his desk, where it shouldn’t have been, in the middle of files screaming guilt and ugliness when his son was all innocence and hope.
Never before had he felt so acutely that you could be filled with emptiness and longing. Sure, he’d experienced it quite a few times because of Linc - in a memorable way even - and with Sara too. But now? The ache, the absence of Sara and the baby, carved its place within him. He feared he shrank down, collapsed around that empty place; it couldn’t happen, he couldn’t let it happen, not if he wanted to see his family again one day.
The baby. Michael. Michael Scofield Jr. Michael Scofield-Tancredi. Michael Tancredi-Scofield. He tested the various combinations, the various possibilities, in his mind. Sara had named their baby - their baby, except that she was alone to raise him, alone with Linc and Sofia’s help, LJ, Sucre and even Mahone: everyone but his father - Michael. It made him so happy and so devastated at the same time
(He tried to picture Lincoln’s reaction had Michael Sr. - he was a ‘Sr.’ now - been around. The teasing about naming his kid after himself and not doing better in that respect than his big brother. The image was meant to keep the wave of emotion in check, and it failed miserably at this task.)
Jamison looked up at the ceiling to give him the time collect himself - and he couldn’t say if it required minutes, hours, or the rest of the day.
“Was it Yoki’s request? The pic?” he asked eventually. It looked like Yoki to be, or seem to be, that thoughtful.
“Possibly,” Jamison admitted gruffly, “but I could have refused.” Then, her voice sounding almost nice and warm despite its strain: “He’s beautiful.”
The photo had been taken only a few hours after the baby was born. He was a bundle of pinkish and wrinkled flesh wrapped in a white cloth, with a few rashes on his cheeks and forehead, and a small mouth pinched in discontentment to have been pulled away from his mother’s breast for some odd guy to take his picture. At this stage, you had to be his mother or his father, or at least very close family, to find him beautiful.
Obviously, short of Sara - and not by much - he was the most perfect human being Michael had ever seen.
He gazed at the picture every night before going to sleep, studied it to the point that he could have drawn by memory each single detail. The creases of Sara’s gown, the curve of her swollen breast, the protective curl of her fingers around the small head. The white diaper of Michael Jr., the way his tiny nose wrinkled, the delicate nails. The hint of a huge hand right at the top right corner of the image, a hand that had to be Lincoln’s. The teddy bear dressed in a blue checked jumpsuit lying on Sara’s lap.
The teddy bear became an obsession. Something he thought about when he gazed at the picture, when he pinned it back to the wall, when he woke up in the morning, when he walked to his office and when he exercised at the gym. The teddy bear was one of the first of many things he wouldn’t have been able to give to his son himself.
And it was bad; he knew what obsessions could do to him.
He could be - become - anything to cater to an obsession. He could be smart, strong, purposefully weak, he could be cunning, threatening, manipulative. He could cheat and lie, feel awful about it, but do it nonetheless because it had to be done. Even more so when it concerned something as important as this baby he’d never held in his arms.
He could be anything.
He could be charming.
He hadn’t really tried to be charming since he’d been here; maybe a couple of times with Yoki, but Yoki responded to charm when she wanted to, hinting that his attempts were, in the end, useless.
In the lunchroom of The Foundation, under Yoki’s interested scrutiny, he offered Mrs. Jamison a black coffee - no cream, no sugar, obviously - a smirk and velvety words, snarky but flattering in a quirky way. He offered Mrs. Jamison a challenge because he couldn’t win her over, but he could charm her by eventually letting her have the upper hand. He had a hunch she was the kind of woman who liked to come out on top. He said this last bit aloud and she tipped her head to the side, smiled back at him over her coffee.
It wasn’t the smile of someone who had been charmed.
“Mr. Scofield,” she began in a too reasonable tone. “I can tell that you want something. If you want something, you ask me for it. Straight. If I can give it to you, I will. If I can’t, I won’t. It’s as simple as that. Don’t try to manipulate me, don’t try to fool me, don’t try to woo me. I’m too old and too cynical for you.”
She got up, and he understood that when she told him he should ask for what he wanted, she didn’t mean here and now. She meant on her own terms.
“I am not Sara Tancredi,” she added coldly. “The door here is already open and I don’t care whether you walk through it or not. My contract with Kellerman doesn’t include keeping you captive.”
(They had made this point quite clear, both of them. He was an escape artist: he was here willingly and they were not going to waste time and energy trying to keep him in.)
It hit him in the guts, the backlash, the harshness of the comeback and how Sara would have been entitled to throw something similarly merciless in his face. He’d thought it countless times, but hearing it had a weirdly cathartic quality. He held on to the edges of the table and tried to breathe.
Jamison walked out, but he barely paid attention to her departure. From afar, he could hear Yoki telling him, almost apologizing for her boss, “She’s not a total jerk. She just-”
“I don’t think she is one,” he replied honestly.
And since Mrs. Jamison’s ‘own terms’ implied walking to her office, sitting on the other side of her desk, and waiting for the questions that have to be asked at some point, he did exactly that. He’d done harder things for weirder reasons; it wasn’t an issue to abide by her requirements.
“I want to send a stuffed toy to my son,” he told her the instant she looked up from her computer.
At least, the incident would have given him the small satisfaction of seeing her squint in surprise - she hadn’t seen it coming. He wondered what she’d imagined, what kind of grand scheme she thought he had in mind.
She didn’t ask any questions, though.
“He has nothing from me,” he elaborated. “Of course Sara can’t know it comes from me, but it could be a complimentary gift from some store where she shops or-”
“You have been giving it some thought, haven’t you?” Jamison interrupted him.
He shrugged. “I thought I’d better come prepared.”
“Yes, I’ve heard it’s a pattern of yours.”
She didn’t give him an answer, no yes or no and even less a maybe. She wasn’t a ‘maybe’ kind of woman. But two days later, Tom handed him over a toy catalogue.
“Mrs. Jamison said no smartass move, Sir. Don’t try to pass them a message.”
Yes, he’d figured. No message - his balls, her breakfast, etc. Gotcha. As if, with him supposed to be dead and them logically convinced that he was dead, anything could have passed for a message.
He chose a white duck with a green hat and matching bow-tie.
TBC
Previous / next chapters
--Comments are always welcome and very much appreciated :)