[Fic] Fifty Shades of Lincoln Burrows
I thank _pliskin_ and alazysod for helping me beta this.
Title: Fifty Shades of Lincoln Burrows
Fandom: Prison Break.
Character: Lincoln Burrows.
Theme set: Epsilon.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not true, don't own, wish I did.
Rating: NC-17
Warning(s): Incest, violence, and language.
Hood
He knows it's ridiculous to be afraid of the dark, he's thirty-one for fuck's sake, but as The Day draws nearer and the plan becomes more and more complicated, he finds himself sleeping against the door with his hand propping the slop-slot open because as long as there's some kind of light he knows they haven't pulled that fucking hood down yet and he knows he still has time.
Buzz
Half-asleep but not fully awake, not quiet high but far past sober, and he's just fucked-up enough not to bother with his conscience when Michael settles on top of him.
Wish
Star light, star bright, every night that he remembers ever since he was eight he's walked outside, looked up in the sky, picked the first star he’s seen, and every night that he's done this he's wished the same wish: I wish that me, my family, and friends live long, happy, healthy lives because it's the most generic thing he can think of and he figures if he wishes it enough times someone up there might take pity on his family and answer with something other than a giant "fuck you."
Seasons
Lincoln always liked winter best, because when it snowed out and was so cold that breathing physically hurt to do, people were more apt to give a dollar to him and Mikey and the other kids shivering on the corner.
Threat
The thought of ever doing anything at all to LJ makes him violently ill and makes his skin crawl and even though he knows in the deepest parts of his brain that he would never even think about laying a finger on LJ, he also knows in every other part just what he's done to Michael and he still thinks it's safest for LJ if the threat is just completely removed.
Portrait
LJ and Michael were playing in the corner with blocks and Lisa and her mother were fixing their make-up in their seats next to him when it finally hit Lincoln that if this was what a normal family did, he wasn't sure he could handle it.
Loud
Michael has tiny little scars all around his wrists and the backs of his hands from sinking his teeth into them because Lincoln could never bring himself to cover Michael's mouth; it always felt too much like something he never wanted to name.
Energy
He knows he should get up; maybe make some breakfast, run to 7-11 for some soda, do something, but right at this moment he can think of nothing better than laying in bed with Michael's head on his chest and just wasting the day away.
Purge
He rests his head against his forearm and spits out a mouthful of saliva and hotdog bits, sweaty and cold and sick and he knows it's only going to get worse from here, because he's been through this a half dozen times before and he wonders just how incredibly stupid he must be to keep picking up that pipe even when he knows how it's going to feel when he puts it back down; his stomach lurches again and while it empties it's contents in dry heaves and stomach acid, he feels Michael's lips on his shoulder and he knows it will be all right.
Mouse
Lincoln caught Michael's first pet when Michael was five: a small baby mouse that had been eating through the TV cord in the living room.
Attic
When Linc was thirteen, he had a band and a plan: Toy In The Attic (him, Derrick, Sunshine, Mike, and Mike) was going to go quintuple platinum and he was going to buy his mom a house and a car and Mikey would be their manager and none of their families would ever have to worry about money again (plus they would get a lot of girls, too).
Second-Rate
It scares him to his very core and he'll never say it out loud but all the sex he's ever had; Veronica, Lisa, Latricia, the stripper, even that gymnast, none of them can hold a candle to his baby brother.
Dash
Bare feet pound pavement, eating broken asphalt as lungs take in stinging gulps of icy-cold air and adrenalin replaces blood and thought more complicated than almostalmostalmost vanishes in the heat of the moment.
Attitude
"I swear to God, Mom, I didn't mouth off to Sister Margaret, it's not my fault she can't take a joke!"
Wisdom
“All that matters in this world is the blood that flows through our veins: yours, mine, and LJ’s, everything else is shit.”
Sight
The most beautiful thing he's ever seen in his life is the picture he has of Lisa: nine months and one week pregnant with no makeup and nothing but a pair of boxers and a sports-bra on, chugging from a carton of milk with a hand on her hip.
Address
He never told Michael that they'd found Dad; never told him that the man whose fist he remembers better than his face wanted them when he heard about Mom, never told him about the nice apartment by Navy Pier or the new wife or the two sisters or the brother they had and he certainly never told him about the scrap of paper he keeps in his wallet "just in case."
Minute
It's 2:17 in the morning, two hours and thirteen minutes until he has to be on the El to day labor, when he opens the door and meets his son for the first time.
Cotton
Fifteen minutes of kicking and screaming and it's the bribe of playing a game with Uncle Mike that finally gets LJ to sit still long enough for Lincoln to clean the sand out of his ears.
Claw
Twenty dollars and an hour later, Michael has his Superman, LJ has a matching Batman and Lisa has an indulgent smile and an arm full of teddy-bears and love-puppy filler.
Limit
After LJ comes into his life, he sets up new boundaries: he doesn't hug LJ because he does hug Michael; LJ gets pats on the head and ruffled hair; he doesn't kiss LJ's scrapes; he tells his son it's okay to cry but doesn't hold him when he does; he knows it looks like he's some macho "man's man" who doesn't want his son to be "weak" but in reality, he just wants to be safe.
Unique
Every other time he's fucked up, he's signed his plea, admitted his guilt, had the minimum amount of problems doing his time, and he thinks that should count for something.
Gravity
He's eleven and in the middle of his first and last hangover ever when he hears the unmistakable loud sound of drawers being dragged open, and despite his best wishes, he manages to drag his eyes open just in time to see his baby brother leap off of the dresser, and suddenly the entire planet seems to come to a stop just long enough for a single thought --crap-- to enter his brain before gravity kicks back on with a vengeance and delivers thirty-seven pounds of feet directly into his stomach.
Yesterday
When Michael was little, he didn't have a good concept of time and Lincoln remembers spending the better part of two weeks explaining to him that everything that happened before didn't happen yesterday or yesterday-night; when Lincoln thinks about tomorrow, he knows that Michael will need someone there to make sure he remembers that it's not all yesterdays.
Jungle
He turned eighteen standing outside of a shitty club working as a bouncer during two of the three weeks he wasn't high.
Garden
The first time he met Lisa's mother, it was at the Springfield Botanical Gardens; she smiled and said he could call her "mom," but he didn't and she never smiled at him the same way again.
Question
Big, watery, bluegreygreen eyes stared up at him and a tiny voice quivered out: "But... What about Mom?"
Text
The pager on his hip vibrated, and even though only Michael knew the number, it still took Lincoln almost fifteen minutes to figure out what 1*177155*400 meant.
Plastic
“...Or plastic?” asks the twenty-eight-year-old high school drop-out on his second day of work, already wondering how many more hours of this he can take before he has to kill himself or quit.
Block
Lincoln always left himself wide open in fights; V always said it was an ego thing, that he didn’t think anyone could hit him; Michael always said it was a stupidity thing, that he liked the way the blood and bruises and gashes and scars looked on him when in reality it was just how he was taught: hit ‘em hard, hit ‘em fast, knock ‘em down, then lick your wounds.
Escort
When Michael removes his shirt, Lincoln knows he's going to Hell, and when he feels Michael's hands on his belt, he knows he's dragging his brother down with him.
Insult
"Yeah, well at least my mother wasn't a fucking--" Lincoln's fist slammed into the other boy's face before he could finish.
Blood
"You've got red on you," Michael laughs and points at the blood-soaked sleeve of Linc's PI suit.
Gold
Lisa made it clear she was never going to marry him, but that didn't mean he couldn't still buy her a ring (of course, it also didn't mean she had to accept it, either).
Spot
The most vivid and fully-formed memory Lincoln has of his father is from when he was three: he spilled a big-boy cup of red Kool-Aid on the floor and had his face rubbed in it like a dog who had just pissed in front of his master.
Melt
He caved, he melted, he broke, he gave in, whatever you want to call it he did it, but he never could say no to Michael and he knows for a fact that that's where LJ learned that pout.
Guilt
He knows he's scum, but to the very second that he dies, he'll believe that the best thing he's ever done in his entire life is stay the fuck out of LJ's.
Duel
Learning how to box was always stupid in his opinion; it was like learning how to sword fight or speak some language that’s been dead for three hundred and eighty million years, since nobody boxes in real life, and you don’t meet at a specific time and place to fight fair; you meet to hit each other with every dirty move you have until either the other guy either stops moving or you get pulled off of him kicking and screaming.
Stranger
"Hi, Dad."
Wait
Thoughts run through his head at a thousand miles an hour as they seat him in the chair --you never got to say goodbye to Dad before he left or Mom before she died and I know you want to be strong and you don't want them to remember you as weak but for the love of God if you don't say you love them now you'll never-- his heart races and his voice strains through the hood: "Wait!"
Glow
“Lincoln, get that glow-stick out of your mouth right-no, don’t bite on it!”
Action
When Lincoln was fifteen, he decided that his life was actually some crappy independent movie that no one paid to see.
Chin
When he was seven, Lincoln fell in the shower and had to get seven stitches in his chin after splitting it open on the metal slider, and his mother made him take baths for the next three and a half years.
Bitter
He hates most of the people at Fox River; preppy kids who thought a life of crime would be fun, whiny fucks who blame all their problems on their parents and everyone else, child-molesters and baby-killers and all the other "woe is me" motherfuckers sitting in their cells talking about how innocent they are and bitching and moaning about the "injustice" of it all; sometimes he hates them so much he wishes he had killed Steadman just so he could stop feeling sick when someone else faked innocence and shot his believability down another foot and a half.
Lock
"Let me in, Michael," he yells banging on the door, "this isn't funny anymore," in his underwear, "I will kill you if you don't let me in right now," as the maid pushes her cart around the corner.
Order
"--ee number fours, two Breakfast Jack's, five Sourdough Jacks, a chocolate shake, a vanilla shake, two Cokes, three Mister Pibbs, a Sprite, a lemonade, six coffees, twelve tacos, nine jumbo fries, seven cheesecakes, four bacon-cheddar potato-wedges, eight orders of three eggrolls, two more Jumbo Jacks--"
"Hey, Sink, man, college boy says don't forget the barbecue sauce."
Friends
He remembers when Veronica told him they could still be friends, and how they never spoke civilly again (because you really can't with someone who thinks you're a worthless bastard who ruins people’s lives, no matter how true it is) but when Lisa says, it he really believes her.
Prison
Linc could never keep himself from laughing at all the straight and narrow idiots who got all bent out of shape at the thought of going to “the big house,”; given a choice between Cook County Jail and Fox River Penitentiary, he’d chose Fox River in a heartbeat.
Journal
He kept a journal when he was a kid, a random notebook with "LINKIN'S JERNAL KEEP OWT" erased into the cover of it: the book was filled with random drawings and the odd word or number combination here and there; it never had anything of real substance in it, though, since he could never bring himself to write down his thoughts or feelings because giving them words gives them a name, and that makes everything real.
Zero
It wasn't just that he lost, and it wasn't even that he lost to Michael; it was that he lost twenty-fucking-seven to zero.
Title: Fifty Shades of Lincoln Burrows
Fandom: Prison Break.
Character: Lincoln Burrows.
Theme set: Epsilon.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not true, don't own, wish I did.
Rating: NC-17
Warning(s): Incest, violence, and language.
Hood
He knows it's ridiculous to be afraid of the dark, he's thirty-one for fuck's sake, but as The Day draws nearer and the plan becomes more and more complicated, he finds himself sleeping against the door with his hand propping the slop-slot open because as long as there's some kind of light he knows they haven't pulled that fucking hood down yet and he knows he still has time.
Buzz
Half-asleep but not fully awake, not quiet high but far past sober, and he's just fucked-up enough not to bother with his conscience when Michael settles on top of him.
Wish
Star light, star bright, every night that he remembers ever since he was eight he's walked outside, looked up in the sky, picked the first star he’s seen, and every night that he's done this he's wished the same wish: I wish that me, my family, and friends live long, happy, healthy lives because it's the most generic thing he can think of and he figures if he wishes it enough times someone up there might take pity on his family and answer with something other than a giant "fuck you."
Seasons
Lincoln always liked winter best, because when it snowed out and was so cold that breathing physically hurt to do, people were more apt to give a dollar to him and Mikey and the other kids shivering on the corner.
Threat
The thought of ever doing anything at all to LJ makes him violently ill and makes his skin crawl and even though he knows in the deepest parts of his brain that he would never even think about laying a finger on LJ, he also knows in every other part just what he's done to Michael and he still thinks it's safest for LJ if the threat is just completely removed.
Portrait
LJ and Michael were playing in the corner with blocks and Lisa and her mother were fixing their make-up in their seats next to him when it finally hit Lincoln that if this was what a normal family did, he wasn't sure he could handle it.
Loud
Michael has tiny little scars all around his wrists and the backs of his hands from sinking his teeth into them because Lincoln could never bring himself to cover Michael's mouth; it always felt too much like something he never wanted to name.
Energy
He knows he should get up; maybe make some breakfast, run to 7-11 for some soda, do something, but right at this moment he can think of nothing better than laying in bed with Michael's head on his chest and just wasting the day away.
Purge
He rests his head against his forearm and spits out a mouthful of saliva and hotdog bits, sweaty and cold and sick and he knows it's only going to get worse from here, because he's been through this a half dozen times before and he wonders just how incredibly stupid he must be to keep picking up that pipe even when he knows how it's going to feel when he puts it back down; his stomach lurches again and while it empties it's contents in dry heaves and stomach acid, he feels Michael's lips on his shoulder and he knows it will be all right.
Mouse
Lincoln caught Michael's first pet when Michael was five: a small baby mouse that had been eating through the TV cord in the living room.
Attic
When Linc was thirteen, he had a band and a plan: Toy In The Attic (him, Derrick, Sunshine, Mike, and Mike) was going to go quintuple platinum and he was going to buy his mom a house and a car and Mikey would be their manager and none of their families would ever have to worry about money again (plus they would get a lot of girls, too).
Second-Rate
It scares him to his very core and he'll never say it out loud but all the sex he's ever had; Veronica, Lisa, Latricia, the stripper, even that gymnast, none of them can hold a candle to his baby brother.
Dash
Bare feet pound pavement, eating broken asphalt as lungs take in stinging gulps of icy-cold air and adrenalin replaces blood and thought more complicated than almostalmostalmost vanishes in the heat of the moment.
Attitude
"I swear to God, Mom, I didn't mouth off to Sister Margaret, it's not my fault she can't take a joke!"
Wisdom
“All that matters in this world is the blood that flows through our veins: yours, mine, and LJ’s, everything else is shit.”
Sight
The most beautiful thing he's ever seen in his life is the picture he has of Lisa: nine months and one week pregnant with no makeup and nothing but a pair of boxers and a sports-bra on, chugging from a carton of milk with a hand on her hip.
Address
He never told Michael that they'd found Dad; never told him that the man whose fist he remembers better than his face wanted them when he heard about Mom, never told him about the nice apartment by Navy Pier or the new wife or the two sisters or the brother they had and he certainly never told him about the scrap of paper he keeps in his wallet "just in case."
Minute
It's 2:17 in the morning, two hours and thirteen minutes until he has to be on the El to day labor, when he opens the door and meets his son for the first time.
Cotton
Fifteen minutes of kicking and screaming and it's the bribe of playing a game with Uncle Mike that finally gets LJ to sit still long enough for Lincoln to clean the sand out of his ears.
Claw
Twenty dollars and an hour later, Michael has his Superman, LJ has a matching Batman and Lisa has an indulgent smile and an arm full of teddy-bears and love-puppy filler.
Limit
After LJ comes into his life, he sets up new boundaries: he doesn't hug LJ because he does hug Michael; LJ gets pats on the head and ruffled hair; he doesn't kiss LJ's scrapes; he tells his son it's okay to cry but doesn't hold him when he does; he knows it looks like he's some macho "man's man" who doesn't want his son to be "weak" but in reality, he just wants to be safe.
Unique
Every other time he's fucked up, he's signed his plea, admitted his guilt, had the minimum amount of problems doing his time, and he thinks that should count for something.
Gravity
He's eleven and in the middle of his first and last hangover ever when he hears the unmistakable loud sound of drawers being dragged open, and despite his best wishes, he manages to drag his eyes open just in time to see his baby brother leap off of the dresser, and suddenly the entire planet seems to come to a stop just long enough for a single thought --crap-- to enter his brain before gravity kicks back on with a vengeance and delivers thirty-seven pounds of feet directly into his stomach.
Yesterday
When Michael was little, he didn't have a good concept of time and Lincoln remembers spending the better part of two weeks explaining to him that everything that happened before didn't happen yesterday or yesterday-night; when Lincoln thinks about tomorrow, he knows that Michael will need someone there to make sure he remembers that it's not all yesterdays.
Jungle
He turned eighteen standing outside of a shitty club working as a bouncer during two of the three weeks he wasn't high.
Garden
The first time he met Lisa's mother, it was at the Springfield Botanical Gardens; she smiled and said he could call her "mom," but he didn't and she never smiled at him the same way again.
Question
Big, watery, bluegreygreen eyes stared up at him and a tiny voice quivered out: "But... What about Mom?"
Text
The pager on his hip vibrated, and even though only Michael knew the number, it still took Lincoln almost fifteen minutes to figure out what 1*177155*400 meant.
Plastic
“...Or plastic?” asks the twenty-eight-year-old high school drop-out on his second day of work, already wondering how many more hours of this he can take before he has to kill himself or quit.
Block
Lincoln always left himself wide open in fights; V always said it was an ego thing, that he didn’t think anyone could hit him; Michael always said it was a stupidity thing, that he liked the way the blood and bruises and gashes and scars looked on him when in reality it was just how he was taught: hit ‘em hard, hit ‘em fast, knock ‘em down, then lick your wounds.
Escort
When Michael removes his shirt, Lincoln knows he's going to Hell, and when he feels Michael's hands on his belt, he knows he's dragging his brother down with him.
Insult
"Yeah, well at least my mother wasn't a fucking--" Lincoln's fist slammed into the other boy's face before he could finish.
Blood
"You've got red on you," Michael laughs and points at the blood-soaked sleeve of Linc's PI suit.
Gold
Lisa made it clear she was never going to marry him, but that didn't mean he couldn't still buy her a ring (of course, it also didn't mean she had to accept it, either).
Spot
The most vivid and fully-formed memory Lincoln has of his father is from when he was three: he spilled a big-boy cup of red Kool-Aid on the floor and had his face rubbed in it like a dog who had just pissed in front of his master.
Melt
He caved, he melted, he broke, he gave in, whatever you want to call it he did it, but he never could say no to Michael and he knows for a fact that that's where LJ learned that pout.
Guilt
He knows he's scum, but to the very second that he dies, he'll believe that the best thing he's ever done in his entire life is stay the fuck out of LJ's.
Duel
Learning how to box was always stupid in his opinion; it was like learning how to sword fight or speak some language that’s been dead for three hundred and eighty million years, since nobody boxes in real life, and you don’t meet at a specific time and place to fight fair; you meet to hit each other with every dirty move you have until either the other guy either stops moving or you get pulled off of him kicking and screaming.
Stranger
"Hi, Dad."
Wait
Thoughts run through his head at a thousand miles an hour as they seat him in the chair --you never got to say goodbye to Dad before he left or Mom before she died and I know you want to be strong and you don't want them to remember you as weak but for the love of God if you don't say you love them now you'll never-- his heart races and his voice strains through the hood: "Wait!"
Glow
“Lincoln, get that glow-stick out of your mouth right-no, don’t bite on it!”
Action
When Lincoln was fifteen, he decided that his life was actually some crappy independent movie that no one paid to see.
Chin
When he was seven, Lincoln fell in the shower and had to get seven stitches in his chin after splitting it open on the metal slider, and his mother made him take baths for the next three and a half years.
Bitter
He hates most of the people at Fox River; preppy kids who thought a life of crime would be fun, whiny fucks who blame all their problems on their parents and everyone else, child-molesters and baby-killers and all the other "woe is me" motherfuckers sitting in their cells talking about how innocent they are and bitching and moaning about the "injustice" of it all; sometimes he hates them so much he wishes he had killed Steadman just so he could stop feeling sick when someone else faked innocence and shot his believability down another foot and a half.
Lock
"Let me in, Michael," he yells banging on the door, "this isn't funny anymore," in his underwear, "I will kill you if you don't let me in right now," as the maid pushes her cart around the corner.
Order
"--ee number fours, two Breakfast Jack's, five Sourdough Jacks, a chocolate shake, a vanilla shake, two Cokes, three Mister Pibbs, a Sprite, a lemonade, six coffees, twelve tacos, nine jumbo fries, seven cheesecakes, four bacon-cheddar potato-wedges, eight orders of three eggrolls, two more Jumbo Jacks--"
"Hey, Sink, man, college boy says don't forget the barbecue sauce."
Friends
He remembers when Veronica told him they could still be friends, and how they never spoke civilly again (because you really can't with someone who thinks you're a worthless bastard who ruins people’s lives, no matter how true it is) but when Lisa says, it he really believes her.
Prison
Linc could never keep himself from laughing at all the straight and narrow idiots who got all bent out of shape at the thought of going to “the big house,”; given a choice between Cook County Jail and Fox River Penitentiary, he’d chose Fox River in a heartbeat.
Journal
He kept a journal when he was a kid, a random notebook with "LINKIN'S JERNAL KEEP OWT" erased into the cover of it: the book was filled with random drawings and the odd word or number combination here and there; it never had anything of real substance in it, though, since he could never bring himself to write down his thoughts or feelings because giving them words gives them a name, and that makes everything real.
Zero
It wasn't just that he lost, and it wasn't even that he lost to Michael; it was that he lost twenty-fucking-seven to zero.