Prison Break - Story of Faith (18/27)
Title: Story of Faith (18/27) - 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: ~ 2,030 (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 18
Full lights flashing on in the bedroom, heels clicking on the wooden floor and metallic voice: when it came to waking up someone in the middle of the night, Mrs. Jamison had no lesson to take from the badges at Fox River. She had no more care for Michael’s modesty either as she grabbed jeans, a shirt and a pair of shoes in his closet, threw the clothing on his bed, and waited by the door while he got dressed.
She had her gun in its holster at her waist. He’d suspected she carried one, but it was the first time he actually saw it, within reach in a fraction of second. It couldn’t be good.
“The security breach has been confirmed. I’m taking you to a safe room while we check a few things.”
He froze with his pants mid-legs while pulling them on - fuck modesty.
“My family?”
“On it.”
He would have to be content with that for now, to trust that her people were doing everything that needed to be done for Sara, Lincoln and Michael Jr.
“Smythe knows who we are,” Jamison added while Michael was buttoning his shirt.
It was bound to happen sooner or later. Smythe - as well as Acero and Chopra - was smart, savvy, experienced; too much to attribute all of the troubles, struggles and internal wars between the News Heads to bad luck and lack of cooperation between them. Of course they had known about someone, something, tampering with them, although Michael had never managed to find out to what extent they were aware of The Foundation’s activities.
He was amazed that The Foundation had managed to keep a low profile for such a long time.
(Amazed and frightened. Good thing they were the nice guys in this story. Sort of the nice guys, all things being relative. Mrs. Jamison was hardly Mother Teresa, and Kellerman... Kellerman was Kellerman, even if this new version of him was a bit better than his previous self.)
“I take it you’ve found your mole?”
During the last week, Mrs. Jamison had been letting slip specific intel to specific people. It wasn’t an original tactic, but it had achieved the goal even though she didn’t look happy with the result she’d got. There was no way she could win that one in the first place anyway.
The second he’d snapped his belt buckle closed, she nodded at the door, grumbled “Come on,” and escorted him outside.
The hallways were quiet and empty. Their footsteps were loud on the marble floor and echoing in the silence. The hallways at The Foundation were never totally empty. Even at three or four in the morning, there always was someone on a mission or assigned task. Mrs. Jamison had had the place cleared for him, and they met nobody on their way to the safe room located in a sublevel.
“Are you going to tell me who it is?” The mole?” he asked as the elevator moved down, trying to take his mind off his wife, his kid, his brother.
She didn’t answer. He wondered if she was already focusing on those ‘few things’ she needed to check while he would be locked up for his own safety, or if she merely didn’t know how to break the news to him. She wasn’t the emotional kind, but even she had to feel something when fooled in such a way.
The distraction of learning the identity of the mole being delayed for a few more minutes, he leaned against the wall of the booth and tried not to think about Costa Rica. He would lose his mind if he thought about Sara and Linc now, about what Smythe could do if he knew that Michael was still alive and working on taking him and his organization down.
Someone he’d been working with for four years had betrayed - betrayed The Foundation, their cause, betrayed him.
More hallways and a steel door with a couple of guards in dark suits, and behind it, the safe room. Five people were sitting around a metallic table, a sixth chair waiting for him.
Nat, Pat, Cat. Lena. Yoki - and despite his conviction that Yoki would have never done such a thing, it brought him a hint of comfort and relief to see her here.
Tom wasn’t in the room.
* * *
Michael put his foot in the doorway of the safe room, preventing the guard from closing it and trapping him inside. There was no doubt the man could remove him forcefully, but Jamison raised an index finger to stop him and he moved back.
“I want to see Tom,” Michael demanded. “I want to talk to him. I need to know-”
“No. To all of it. To any requests regarding him. No.”
Jamison breezed past him and into the safe room, away from the guards’ ears. Michael followed and closed the door behind them.
“What have you done to him? What are you going to do to him?”
The analysts and Lena kept their eyes on the table around which they were seated. Only Yoki was looking up, at Michael and Jamison, maybe to help Jamison if needed, maybe to make sure Michael would be all right.
“You’re pretty lenient for a man whose family could be in danger because of this agent’s actions.”
It wasn’t about leniency. If Tom was facing him, he’d want to beat him to a pulp, hit and punch until the bodyguard was a bloody mess and wasn’t even able to ask him to stop anymore. But as Jamison had pointed out only a few days ago, he knew The Company’s methods, how merciless they could be. He could never forgive Tom, but he wanted - needed - to know what The Company had done to get him to betray them.
“No.” Mrs. Jamison seemed to be in a no phase tonight. “It doesn’t work like that. He works for me. He knows the people we go against can threaten him or those he cares about. He knows that risk is part of the job and he knows the protocols to follow if this happens. He didn’t even try.” She shrugged. “What do you think you talking to him would achieve? Now, you sit here with your team and you wait. I have an interrogation to lead. As soon as I know the extent of the damages, you’ll be authorized to resume your work. Your family’s safety is being dealt with.”
Yoki pulled a chair for him next to hers and nodded at him. She was right of course. Yoki, the voice of reason. The sooner Jamison was done with Tom, the sooner they could go back to the office and start tracking Smythe again - with an added motivation, as if they needed one.
“If I may so, Sir,” Lena said after Jamison had left the room, “it shouldn’t be too long before we’re allowed to go back to work.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Stick and carrot: the method they’d been using to lure The Company’s defectors. If Tom had betrayed them, there was a chance that the stick The Company had used was much more efficient than any of the carrots The Foundation could offer. Jamison was left with the stick, and Michael had a good idea of how harshly she could handle it. His boxer face and bunched muscles wouldn’t be much of a help to Tom in that interrogation room.
(He shouldn’t care about Tom. He should worry about Sara and Linc, about his son and his nephew. He did worry about them. But the very man who had just deceived him and put their lives in danger had been a discreet and constant support for the last four years. He just couldn’t wrap his head around the situation, which was stupid; childish even. All the dead bodies The Company had left in its wake, his mother’s fate, what they did to Sara... What was a glorified bodyguard’s betrayal in regard of all that?)
“Mrs. Jamison isn’t going to hurt him... much,” Pat stepped in.
“Please don’t pretend she would never use this kind of method.”
He’d seen her face, her eyes, her demeanor: icy and collected, focused. Cold angers were the worst. Michael ought to know; he was prone to them too. He’d been working with her for four years, anyway, and was perfectly aware that if physical and psychological violence wasn’t something she liked, she would have no qualms resorting to it if needed.
“No, that’s not what I mean. She’ll do whatever she needs to do to make him talk, but Tom’s smart: he knows that being upfront is his best shot.”
(His only shot.)
Tom was smart. And not as strong as Michael had imagined, feeling guiltier than he could ever suspect or perhaps Jamison was just that convincing. Either way, it was only a couple of hours before she opened the door of the safe room and signaled the analysts and Yoki they could go. Lena, excluded from the release authorization, stood demurely and waited for her punishment.
(It had been two long hours. Nobody felt like talking, not even Yoki who couldn’t ignore what Jamison acted like in the interrogation room. Quickly, Tom’s fate had taken a secondary stance in Michael’s considerations, even the disloyalty put on the back burner. Sara, Mikey and Lincoln, and an arborescence of what if had invaded his mind, from the harmless to the scariest, back and forth, back and forth, again and again, ad nauseam. He’d hardly noticed Yoki when she’d asked him if he was okay - he wasn’t, not at all. This was the kind of moment where he cursed his predisposition for seeing the smallest details in every and all situations.)
“Tom made it clear you didn’t know anything, and his statement seems to be genuine,” Jamison told Lena. “I want to have a word with you, though. Go wait for me in my office. Close the door on your way out.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Michael watched the young woman exit the room and asked, “What did she do?”
“Nothing. That’s the issue, she did nothing. She was working with him, it was happening right near her, and she saw nothing. She deserves a good rap on the knuckles.”
(Last time a Foundation’s operative got a good rap on the knuckles, he disappeared for three days and came back a bit pale. Back then, Michael asked Tom, only half-joking, if The Foundation happened to have the equivalent of the SHU. He never got an answer, which was an answer in itself.)
She sat opposite of Michael and slumped slightly into her chair, something Michael had never witnessed in four years. She looked weary, wiped out, her hair slightly mussed, her make-up and usual icy cold melting.
“I’m doing what I think is safer for your family, Michael.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I’m not sure it’s the smartest course of action for our mission, strategically speaking, and Kellerman may blow a gasket when he finds out. Meaning I’m not sure my business relationship with him will have a future after this operation is over. Meaning I don’t give a fuck about Kellerman blowing a gasket.”
Michael tilted his head and smirked at her, coy smile and velvety look. Maybe it was because she was tired and disgruntled because of Tom, angry at herself to have been fooled by someone she had entrusted with the safety of their main asset, but the charm act she’d warned him about when he first arrived here did work. Kind of. She blinked and suppressed a smile, her cheekbones even flushing a little bit.
“Mrs. J.,” he began, impersonating Kellerman’s best assholish tone, “don’t overplay it. You know that whatever road you choose, if this op is a success, you’ll be his top contractor ‘til the end the days, and probably a bit after that.”
“Jeez. Just what I hoped for: an eternity of working with Mr. Kellerman.”
“We all have our cross to bear but I have to admit, this a heavy one. Now, I’d like to know what arrangements you’ve made for Sara and Lincoln, and then I need to go back to work. Please?”
TBC
--Feedback is a lovely but highly improbable notion.
Previous / next chapters
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: ~ 2,030 (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 18
Full lights flashing on in the bedroom, heels clicking on the wooden floor and metallic voice: when it came to waking up someone in the middle of the night, Mrs. Jamison had no lesson to take from the badges at Fox River. She had no more care for Michael’s modesty either as she grabbed jeans, a shirt and a pair of shoes in his closet, threw the clothing on his bed, and waited by the door while he got dressed.
She had her gun in its holster at her waist. He’d suspected she carried one, but it was the first time he actually saw it, within reach in a fraction of second. It couldn’t be good.
“The security breach has been confirmed. I’m taking you to a safe room while we check a few things.”
He froze with his pants mid-legs while pulling them on - fuck modesty.
“My family?”
“On it.”
He would have to be content with that for now, to trust that her people were doing everything that needed to be done for Sara, Lincoln and Michael Jr.
“Smythe knows who we are,” Jamison added while Michael was buttoning his shirt.
It was bound to happen sooner or later. Smythe - as well as Acero and Chopra - was smart, savvy, experienced; too much to attribute all of the troubles, struggles and internal wars between the News Heads to bad luck and lack of cooperation between them. Of course they had known about someone, something, tampering with them, although Michael had never managed to find out to what extent they were aware of The Foundation’s activities.
He was amazed that The Foundation had managed to keep a low profile for such a long time.
(Amazed and frightened. Good thing they were the nice guys in this story. Sort of the nice guys, all things being relative. Mrs. Jamison was hardly Mother Teresa, and Kellerman... Kellerman was Kellerman, even if this new version of him was a bit better than his previous self.)
“I take it you’ve found your mole?”
During the last week, Mrs. Jamison had been letting slip specific intel to specific people. It wasn’t an original tactic, but it had achieved the goal even though she didn’t look happy with the result she’d got. There was no way she could win that one in the first place anyway.
The second he’d snapped his belt buckle closed, she nodded at the door, grumbled “Come on,” and escorted him outside.
The hallways were quiet and empty. Their footsteps were loud on the marble floor and echoing in the silence. The hallways at The Foundation were never totally empty. Even at three or four in the morning, there always was someone on a mission or assigned task. Mrs. Jamison had had the place cleared for him, and they met nobody on their way to the safe room located in a sublevel.
“Are you going to tell me who it is?” The mole?” he asked as the elevator moved down, trying to take his mind off his wife, his kid, his brother.
She didn’t answer. He wondered if she was already focusing on those ‘few things’ she needed to check while he would be locked up for his own safety, or if she merely didn’t know how to break the news to him. She wasn’t the emotional kind, but even she had to feel something when fooled in such a way.
The distraction of learning the identity of the mole being delayed for a few more minutes, he leaned against the wall of the booth and tried not to think about Costa Rica. He would lose his mind if he thought about Sara and Linc now, about what Smythe could do if he knew that Michael was still alive and working on taking him and his organization down.
Someone he’d been working with for four years had betrayed - betrayed The Foundation, their cause, betrayed him.
More hallways and a steel door with a couple of guards in dark suits, and behind it, the safe room. Five people were sitting around a metallic table, a sixth chair waiting for him.
Nat, Pat, Cat. Lena. Yoki - and despite his conviction that Yoki would have never done such a thing, it brought him a hint of comfort and relief to see her here.
Tom wasn’t in the room.
* * *
Michael put his foot in the doorway of the safe room, preventing the guard from closing it and trapping him inside. There was no doubt the man could remove him forcefully, but Jamison raised an index finger to stop him and he moved back.
“I want to see Tom,” Michael demanded. “I want to talk to him. I need to know-”
“No. To all of it. To any requests regarding him. No.”
Jamison breezed past him and into the safe room, away from the guards’ ears. Michael followed and closed the door behind them.
“What have you done to him? What are you going to do to him?”
The analysts and Lena kept their eyes on the table around which they were seated. Only Yoki was looking up, at Michael and Jamison, maybe to help Jamison if needed, maybe to make sure Michael would be all right.
“You’re pretty lenient for a man whose family could be in danger because of this agent’s actions.”
It wasn’t about leniency. If Tom was facing him, he’d want to beat him to a pulp, hit and punch until the bodyguard was a bloody mess and wasn’t even able to ask him to stop anymore. But as Jamison had pointed out only a few days ago, he knew The Company’s methods, how merciless they could be. He could never forgive Tom, but he wanted - needed - to know what The Company had done to get him to betray them.
“No.” Mrs. Jamison seemed to be in a no phase tonight. “It doesn’t work like that. He works for me. He knows the people we go against can threaten him or those he cares about. He knows that risk is part of the job and he knows the protocols to follow if this happens. He didn’t even try.” She shrugged. “What do you think you talking to him would achieve? Now, you sit here with your team and you wait. I have an interrogation to lead. As soon as I know the extent of the damages, you’ll be authorized to resume your work. Your family’s safety is being dealt with.”
Yoki pulled a chair for him next to hers and nodded at him. She was right of course. Yoki, the voice of reason. The sooner Jamison was done with Tom, the sooner they could go back to the office and start tracking Smythe again - with an added motivation, as if they needed one.
“If I may so, Sir,” Lena said after Jamison had left the room, “it shouldn’t be too long before we’re allowed to go back to work.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Stick and carrot: the method they’d been using to lure The Company’s defectors. If Tom had betrayed them, there was a chance that the stick The Company had used was much more efficient than any of the carrots The Foundation could offer. Jamison was left with the stick, and Michael had a good idea of how harshly she could handle it. His boxer face and bunched muscles wouldn’t be much of a help to Tom in that interrogation room.
(He shouldn’t care about Tom. He should worry about Sara and Linc, about his son and his nephew. He did worry about them. But the very man who had just deceived him and put their lives in danger had been a discreet and constant support for the last four years. He just couldn’t wrap his head around the situation, which was stupid; childish even. All the dead bodies The Company had left in its wake, his mother’s fate, what they did to Sara... What was a glorified bodyguard’s betrayal in regard of all that?)
“Mrs. Jamison isn’t going to hurt him... much,” Pat stepped in.
“Please don’t pretend she would never use this kind of method.”
He’d seen her face, her eyes, her demeanor: icy and collected, focused. Cold angers were the worst. Michael ought to know; he was prone to them too. He’d been working with her for four years, anyway, and was perfectly aware that if physical and psychological violence wasn’t something she liked, she would have no qualms resorting to it if needed.
“No, that’s not what I mean. She’ll do whatever she needs to do to make him talk, but Tom’s smart: he knows that being upfront is his best shot.”
(His only shot.)
Tom was smart. And not as strong as Michael had imagined, feeling guiltier than he could ever suspect or perhaps Jamison was just that convincing. Either way, it was only a couple of hours before she opened the door of the safe room and signaled the analysts and Yoki they could go. Lena, excluded from the release authorization, stood demurely and waited for her punishment.
(It had been two long hours. Nobody felt like talking, not even Yoki who couldn’t ignore what Jamison acted like in the interrogation room. Quickly, Tom’s fate had taken a secondary stance in Michael’s considerations, even the disloyalty put on the back burner. Sara, Mikey and Lincoln, and an arborescence of what if had invaded his mind, from the harmless to the scariest, back and forth, back and forth, again and again, ad nauseam. He’d hardly noticed Yoki when she’d asked him if he was okay - he wasn’t, not at all. This was the kind of moment where he cursed his predisposition for seeing the smallest details in every and all situations.)
“Tom made it clear you didn’t know anything, and his statement seems to be genuine,” Jamison told Lena. “I want to have a word with you, though. Go wait for me in my office. Close the door on your way out.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Michael watched the young woman exit the room and asked, “What did she do?”
“Nothing. That’s the issue, she did nothing. She was working with him, it was happening right near her, and she saw nothing. She deserves a good rap on the knuckles.”
(Last time a Foundation’s operative got a good rap on the knuckles, he disappeared for three days and came back a bit pale. Back then, Michael asked Tom, only half-joking, if The Foundation happened to have the equivalent of the SHU. He never got an answer, which was an answer in itself.)
She sat opposite of Michael and slumped slightly into her chair, something Michael had never witnessed in four years. She looked weary, wiped out, her hair slightly mussed, her make-up and usual icy cold melting.
“I’m doing what I think is safer for your family, Michael.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I’m not sure it’s the smartest course of action for our mission, strategically speaking, and Kellerman may blow a gasket when he finds out. Meaning I’m not sure my business relationship with him will have a future after this operation is over. Meaning I don’t give a fuck about Kellerman blowing a gasket.”
Michael tilted his head and smirked at her, coy smile and velvety look. Maybe it was because she was tired and disgruntled because of Tom, angry at herself to have been fooled by someone she had entrusted with the safety of their main asset, but the charm act she’d warned him about when he first arrived here did work. Kind of. She blinked and suppressed a smile, her cheekbones even flushing a little bit.
“Mrs. J.,” he began, impersonating Kellerman’s best assholish tone, “don’t overplay it. You know that whatever road you choose, if this op is a success, you’ll be his top contractor ‘til the end the days, and probably a bit after that.”
“Jeez. Just what I hoped for: an eternity of working with Mr. Kellerman.”
“We all have our cross to bear but I have to admit, this a heavy one. Now, I’d like to know what arrangements you’ve made for Sara and Lincoln, and then I need to go back to work. Please?”
TBC
--Feedback is a lovely but highly improbable notion.
Previous / next chapters