Worth the Ache (1/2)
Title: Worth the Ache (1/2)
Author:
domfangirl
Pairing/Characters: Michael/Sara, with an appearance by Lincoln
Genre: Post-escape (from Sona), angst, drama, fluff, humor
Rating: R (Language, implied sexual situations)
Summary: Michael and Sara haven't seen each other in three years, because he left her in Panama after he got out of Sona. Now circumstances bring them back together...and well, you'll have to read to find out what happens...
Author's Notes: This is written for the lovely and talented
msgenevieve as an exchange for her fantastic Linc/Jane story, Sleeping With Ghosts. The prompts she gave me were Post-Sona with Michael and Sara attempting to be *friends.* Don't ask me where the rest of it came from, but
saestina gave me a quick beta on the first portion and made me feel as if it were interesting. So if you don't like it, blame her. No, just kidding, all mistakes are mine. And, Jen, there will be NC-17, don't worry, it's just not until the next chapter. I had a lot of plot to lay down before they could...you know, lay down ;-)
Warnings: There are spoilers for the film Somewhere In Time in this piece. Additionally, all references to what happened to Michael in Sona are based on my own speculation, not spoilers or anything I've read about the show.
I wanna wrap the moon around us
Lay beside you, skin on skin
Make love 'til the sun comes up
'Til the sun goes down again
'Cause I need you
~from I Need You by Tim McGraw & Faith Hill
When Michael Scofield had climbed on board the El in the early afternoon, it had been relatively empty. Now, as the commuters piled on, he had to jerk his coat into his lap to make room for the African-American woman who attempted to sit down next to him without even asking him to get it out of her way. She sank onto the bench with a heavy sigh and promptly fell asleep with her chin against her chest while he wondered at her exhaustion. Dressed in a power suit, she obviously worked at one of the financial corporations in the downtown area, and due to her absolute ability to fall asleep despite being surrounded by hundreds of commuters, she must have been up since early that morning, or had just had a really exhausting day.
Michael remembered those days himself, when work knocked him out. Back when he had a job. Before Fox River. Before Sona.
He found himself worrying that his seatmate might miss her stop, but her head lifted about ten seconds before they announced the Randall Street exit, and she, having never said a word to him, picked up her briefcase and prepared to disembark as the train slowed.
Happy to have the seat to himself again, at least momentarily, he dropped his coat back into the empty spot. As the train lurched forward, he glanced up and saw a flash of red as someone sat down about four rows in front of him, sharing the bench seat with another woman. His fingers knotted in the material of his now-forgotten coat.
This was why he rode the El all day some days. Well, he didn’t have anything else to do, that was true, but he had this secret hope that one day, somehow, he might run into her. He knew she was back in Chicago, just like he was, but he hadn’t come up with any clever way to call her, or see her without looking like a total ass. Linc said he should just be a man and call, but Linc didn’t know Dr. Tancredi the way Michael did. She wasn’t as hard-nosed as she liked to think she was, but he had given her plenty of reason to become hard-nosed.
And he just wasn’t as brave as he used to be.
He’d seen her before, but not on this route. The times he’d seen her, she’d always been alone, but she’d also always been briskly walking somewhere once she got off the train, so he’d never followed her. He knew it was cowardice. But today, for whatever reason, he had chosen a route he’d never seen her on, and now here she was. If he didn’t take this chance, he ought to concede that fate might never hand him another opportunity.
She rode the train for almost 38 minutes. As the El slowed again, Michael had no idea what stop they were near, but he got to his feet as he watched her do the same. He scuttled forward, allowing a couple to go in front of him, but not losing sight of her hair. It was long again, hanging past her shoulders halfway down her back, and its natural color. As though she’d washed the dye and all that that dye had meant right out.
But of course she would have. It had been almost three years since he’d seen her. If he allowed himself to remember it correctly, the last time he’d seen her, her hair had been mostly red again anyway, the brown having faded in the Panamanian sun.
Now, he could see she had her own coat draped over her arm. It was early fall, and so on the train it was too warm for an outer layer, but getting off the train, and walking any distance would require something warmer than shirt sleeves. As the trail of people steadily made their way off the train, Michael managed to stay close behind her-but not too close, as he was unsure what he should do. Maybe he’d just stalk her to wherever she was going. He couldn’t see himself actually saying anything to her.
But he wanted to say something to her, and badly.
The few people that he had carefully let build up between them seemed to melt away, and then the brisk wind-the reason Chicago was called The Windy City-took a piece of paper right out of Sara’s hand as she swung her coat around her shoulders. What turned out to be a brochure landed squarely against his chest just as she pivoted, wildly groping for the paper, and Michael took in several things all at once. Her look of utter astonishment as her eyes fell on his face; how the sweater she wore fell across her rounded abdomen as her arms lifted slightly to ease into the sleeves of her coat; the words on the brochure his hand pulled from against his chest-"The Best Childbirth Class for You and Baby."
"Michael?" Sara Tancredi asked. It had been almost three years since he’d heard her voice, but it sounded just the same. Husky and sweet, the tone curled through him, and though the sight of her pregnant belly had sent stabbing pains through his chest, her voice erased some of the pangs. "Oh, my God! Michael!" she gasped, accepting that it was him, though he’d made no response. When he offered the brochure back to her, she laughed joyfully and threw herself against his chest. "Oh, Michael!" she whispered, her cheek brushing past his as her arms surrounded his shoulders.
It seemed to take him forever to respond, his arms moving like they were underwater, slowly circling her, slowly pulling her tightly to him, slowly bringing her and her baby into the place in his mind where he would never forget how they both felt against his body.
"Hello, Sara," he said stiffly, though his body willingly accepted her weight against it. The embrace was only awkward in his mind, because she clung to him just as she had the day he finally emerged from Sona.
She pulled back, her hands sliding from around his neck to touch his face gently. The look in her eyes told him she wasn’t trusting what she was seeing, so she used her soft, competent doctor’s hands to feel for herself that he was there. "How are you?" she asked enthusiastically.
"I’m well, I’m well," he murmured, pushing her back just a little, just enough that her rounded belly wasn’t pressing into his abdomen. "And you? You look like you’re doing great," he said, and then without his permission, his hand reached out and palmed the protruding part of her anatomy. The whole reason he’d pushed her back was so he didn’t have to feel it, and now he had his hand on it. What the hell was wrong with him?
She laughed again, and her hand joined his on her belly. "Well, yes, I am doing great."
"How far along are you?" he asked, pulling back, disengaging slowly but completely from her touch.
"Six months," she said. "She’s going to be a Christmas baby."
"Ah," Michael said, and out of nowhere the words, "Poor planning on your part," popped out. The fact that he even thought it at all galled him; he didn’t need to imagine Sara in a moment of mad passion with-who?-that had resulted in this pregnancy.
She laughed again-and he wished he’d stayed on the train. Yes, he’d wanted to see her, he’d imagined the scenario a thousand times where he at least got to apologize for his disappearing act in Panama, but he didn’t want to see this. He didn’t want to hear her happy laughter for every aspect of her life that didn’t involve him at all. "Oh, no, not poor planning at all. I purposely did all of this, the date too. It’s probably silly," she dropped his gaze to look at her own hand rubbing over her stomach, "but I’m hoping she’ll be born on the 21st of December. That was my dad’s birthday-so. You know. Just silly. There’s of course no way to know for sure."
"Depending on the whims of fate, are you?" he asked, his eyes roaming over her now that she wasn’t looking directly at him. She’d always been beautiful, he’d known that; he’d been able to see that quite easily, but now, at the height of pregnancy, he was certain he’d never seen her look better. Even the glow his memory had tried to capture of how beautiful she’d looked as he’d made love to her didn’t contain this type of radiance, and he was sure his abrupt departure had stolen any meaning for her from that. Truthfully, his abrupt departure had stolen the beauty of the moment from him as well.
Lifting a hand to push back her windswept hair, she raised her gaze back to his. "Yes, I found that plans don’t always go the way you expect them too." There was no censure in her gaze or in her tone, but Michael’s heart shriveled just a bit in his chest anyway. "How is Lincoln?" she inquired, her voice changing perceptibly, as though she couldn’t believe she’d been standing there for all of 60 seconds without asking that important question.
Michael paused briefly, but then told the truth. After all, wasn’t it ironic? "Linc’s great, doing fantastically, really. He and Jane just had another baby, as a matter of fact."
"Another baby?"
"Yes, they’ve got two little ones now. A boy and a girl. Very productive, my brother," Michael said, grinning unapologetically. "He’s got a great life. He’s got everything he should have ever had."
"That’s wonderful to hear, I thought they might get married when we were in Panama," Sara replied, her eyes searching his face. "What about you? Do you have a great life, too?"
The smile that Michael forced his lips into was neither natural nor comfortable, especially following the gleeful expression he’d had while speaking of his brother. To his credit he didn’t try to lie, he just evaded the question. "Not as good as you, obviously. I’ve not gotten married, and I don’t have any pending Christmas babies."
Sara pursed her lips, looking faintly embarrassed. Michael would have asked what was wrong, but the blush that stole into her cheeks sucked the air from his lungs and reminded him of the night when the rush of blood beneath her skin had turned her to live roses beneath his fingertips. She had been velvet under his hands, and the scent he had longed for in the unending dankness of Sona. She had been the perfect flower beneath him, but he’d still cut her lose, unable to fathom a time when he could stand to be in the presence of such beauty. "I’m not married, either," she said, dipping her head slightly. Then she lifted her chin and announced, "I’m 33 years old. I wanted to have a baby. So I went to a sperm bank."
His relief was something akin to unspeakable joy, because he literally could not respond to her. It wasn’t even because he thought they could ever be together, but just knowing that it hadn’t turned out picture perfect for her after the fact helped him to not feel so alone. He loved his brother, and he loved Jane, Lincoln’s ass-kicking-turned-domestic wife, but sometimes their picket-fenced life was nothing but a reminder that he had pushed away the only person he’d ever wanted to share a similar life with.
"Yeah, that’s usually a conversation killer," Sara offered with slight amusement creasing her face. "Why people would be more comfortable knowing some guy knocked me up and ran off and left me than to know I chose this is really strange.
"I wouldn’t be more comfortable knowing some guy knocked you up, Michael thought bitterly, because I’d be that guy, on some level anyway. Aloud he reasoned, "It’s surprising, is all. I don’t think people would look at you and see someone who would need to parent alone. I’m sure there are plenty of men willing to father your child."
He didn’t know why he said it. As soon as it was out of his mouth, he knew he’d just given her the perfect opportunity. But he couldn’t even flinch from it, couldn’t disagree, couldn’t do anything except let her say it, let her feel it, let it soak the air between them. "Well, the one I wanted wasn’t interested," she said quietly, again without accusation. She paused a moment and then asked, "You busy? Want to get a bite?"
His speechlessness didn’t last as long this time. "Sure," he found himself answering, as she pointed up the track towards the train station with a tilt of her head. Following close behind her, he only wondered how he could possibly choke food past the giant lump in his throat.
~*~
Sara Tancredi had decided long ago that her life would only be what she made of it. Sure she could sit around bemoaning the fact that Michael Scofield had left her high and dry in Panama, or she could get on with her life. She could lose herself in a bottle of whiskey or up a hypodermic needle, she could sit around thinking about all the people who she had lost, or she could just get up and move.
So that’s what she’d done. She’d gotten up and moved, until moving felt natural and good again. The day she decided to create her own family, she had cried tears of joy for finally having the strength and courage to make her life what she wanted instead of waiting for something to happen.
So waiting changed from an idyllic fantasy where Michael came back and begged for her to forgive him and take him back (which she always did, but only after he’d really sweated it out) to waiting to see if the artificial insemination took, to waiting to see if the sonogram showed a boy or a girl, to waiting for December to arrive and knowing her little bundle of joy wasn’t far behind.
As she got off the El train, on her way home from her monthly doctor’s appointment, she ran into him, and the happiness she felt at seeing him was something she suspected would be similar to what she would feel the first time she held her child in her arms.
But as she invited him to dinner, she told herself it was only because she needed to know he was all right, that he hadn’t drowned under what Sona had done to him, that he hadn’t disappeared from the earth as surely as he had from her life.
And so they talked. Well, mostly he talked while she ate, because she couldn’t go longer than two hours without either a snack or a restroom, and when she prodded him to eat his meal, he blanched a little and said, "I’m not eating for two, guess I’m not as hungry."
She eyed his turkey sandwich covetously. "I could probably eat your meal too, without batting an eyelid. But I’ve made a deal with myself that I only eat until I’m not starving anymore, as opposed to stuffing myself. Otherwise I’ll end up weighing 250 pounds before this baby’s born."
He scoffed, and pushed his plate towards her. "You look great. I say eat if you want to."
She waggled a finger at him. "No, no, Scofield, do not enable me. You have to help me stay strong." She flashed a smile as he tugged his plate back towards his chest. "So, no luck finding a job?" she asked.
"Well, like a mentioned, I can get a job, but it’s the incessant questions and people wanting to see the tats that really just drive me crazy. I’ve had four different jobs since I’ve been back, but I’ve left each of them, for similar reasons." She imagined he wore long sleeved shirts like the green one he currently had on all the time just because of that.
Thinking about his tattoos had always caused her stomach to pitch lustfully, and his casual mentioning of them proved time hadn’t changed that simple fact. Sara picked up her last French fry, feigning nonchalance. "When did you come back to Chicago?" she asked.
He dropped her gaze and fiddled with one of his own fries. "Over a year ago."
Her chest tightened. She’d known he had no intention of contacting her, ever, but knowing he’d been back that long confirmed it for her. Instead of dwelling on that, she asked another question. "Where were you before that?"
"All over. South America for a while. Then I went to Europe; I spent six months in Australia. I hung around South Africa for a while even. But finally, Linc wanted me to come home. He wanted me to be a part of his kids’ lives. I couldn’t say no." He picked up a fry and ate it, his gaze wandering over to her empty plate for a moment before scooping up a few of his potatoes and dropping them in front of her. "You can’t say no either," he said as she opened her mouth. "A few extra won’t hurt you, and I won’t eat all of them. Can’t waste ‘em."
She picked up a potato in agreement, but said, "If you aren’t happy here, Michael, you can say no. You deserve to be happy too."
He shook his head and looked around the crowded diner they sat in. "I wasn’t happy anywhere, so at least now I’m near my family."
Sara wanted to ask him so many questions. She remembered how he’d been when he came out of Sona, how he hadn’t wanted to talk, but instead he’d just wanted her close, wanted to lie in the silence together, or create a heated vacuum where the only sounds were moans of pleasure from both of them. He hadn’t wanted to tell her then what was wrong, and because he never had, she hadn’t been all that surprised to find him gone one morning, gone without a trace. Devastated, yes, surprised, no.
"I’m sorry, Sara," he said quietly, bringing his eyes back to hers. The intensity that had always been a part of him, what she knew to be determination while in Fox River had become desperation in the aftermath of Sona. Now it just seemed to be apologetic resignation. "I’m sorry I just left. I should have tried to explain, but I didn’t have the words. I still don’t really, except that you have to know it was me, and my messed up head, not you, or anything you did."
Oddly enough, she did know that, that was the part that she’d always understood, and that was why she’d forgiven him almost minutes after she’d found him gone. Now, she just nodded, afraid to speak and ruin the confidence building between them, as well as display the tears gathering in her throat.
"When I came out, all I wanted was you, and I just thought if I could lose myself in you, the rest wouldn’t matter. But that wasn’t true. I started to feel like I was getting it all over you, you know, I was getting the shit that was all over me, all over you, and I just couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t plan it, for once," he smirked at the irony. "I just woke up that morning and packed the duffle bag and left. I was in Brazil before I really knew what I’d done, and by then it was too late to write a letter."
Sara cleared her throat as he paused. "But you did write a letter, it was just to Linc instead of me."
Michael, in the process of lifting a hand to rub over his head, froze. "You were still in Panama, then?" he asked.
"I waited. I waited for eight months. Then the letter came, and we all knew you weren’t coming back. So we packed up and came home. I was only here a few months before I went back to India, I did more volunteer work for about a year, and then I came back again, to Chicago, because it’s my home. I even saw Linc and Jane then; that was just after Aldo was born. But you still weren’t back, and Linc didn’t think you’d be back any time soon."
He dropped his hand exhaustedly to the tabletop. "Have you been in touch with Linc all along?" he asked, and she heard the suspicion in his voice instantly.
"No," she answered quickly, and it was the truth. "That was the last time I saw them, when the baby was just a few months old." She glanced at the waitress who walked past them, but didn’t interrupt their conversation. "It was kind of hard to see them. They were really happy, and…" she trailed off.
"What?" Michael probed, reaching across the table to skim his fingers against the back of her hand.
Sara tensed at that light touch. It was nothing, his long fingers barely even touched the top of her knuckles, but it was enough, just the effort of him trying to touch her, to send bolts of longing shooting through her. "That’s when I started thinking about having a baby on my own," she answered, clearing her throat again. "It took me a long time to know for sure it was the right thing, but I still think it was seeing your brother and his family that day that helped the idea to germinate." Sara sighed, pushing the plate in front of her to the left. She wasn’t hungry anymore, in fact, she was starting to feel a little maudlin, and she knew that as much as they needed to talk about these things, she could only take so much. If it were only his light touch on her hand, or his sorrowful eyes, or the knowledge that all this was too little, too late, that would be one thing; but it was all of those things all at once, and she’d noticed she had become hyper emotional with her pregnancy anyway. She needed to get home, and be alone, so she could sob out loud at the ‘whims of fate’ as Michael had called them.
His forefinger circled over the soft skin on the back of her hand and he all but whispered, "I’m sorry. That’s all I can say, Sara. I’m sorry."
Scooting to the edge of the booth, she wrenched her hand from under his and got to her feet as quickly as her burgeoning belly and the edge of the table would let her. "I know you are, Michael. Believe me," she said, a sob catching in her throat as the tears she tried to hold back flooded unheeded towards the surface. "I know. But I need to go. I’m sorry, too."
She felt as ungraceful as a hippopotamus at a ballet, but she somehow got on her feet and got to the door of the diner before she thought about her half of the bill.
The bell rang over her head as she pushed out into the late September evening. The least he owed her was one dinner. She figured he could pick up the tab.
~*~
"You’re an ass," Lincoln said, looking at his brother with ill-concealed contempt.
Michael looked up from his prone position on Linc’s sofa. "Thanks, big brother," he snapped back.
"Just call her. She was upset. Trust me, pregnant women, they’re fuckin’ crazy. She probably went home and cried and now she feels better. If you call her, like you should have a fuckin’ year ago, she’ll be thrilled. You said she was so happy to see you." Linc cuffed Michael on the head like they were both much younger and then sat down in the overstuffed chair next to the sofa.
"I didn’t have a chance to get her number," Michael mumbled into his elbow. He lay on his stomach on the sofa with his head cradled on his folded arms.
"Hey, jackass, ever heard of a phone book? There’s only one Tancredi in the Oak Park area. She’s easy enough to find. Or you could go to her fuckin’ office. I told you when you first got back, she opened a private practice." Lincoln lifted his feet and planted them on the coffee table.
Michael only grunted a response.
"Hey, I’ve got an idea. We’ll pretend we’re in still in fuckin’ junior high, and I’ll call her and pretend I’m you, and I’ll set something up and then I won’t have to look at you and your hang dog expression all day, every fuckin’ day."
Michael cast a disparaging glance at his brother. "Do you have to swear so much?"
"Until Jane gets home with the kids, I’m saying ‘fuck’ as many times as I can. I’m running out of quarters to put in her consequence jar." Lincoln pointed to a jar sitting on top of the television that was half full of shiny coins.
"At least you guys will be able to take a nice vacation next summer, huh?" Michael asked, laughing quietly at the rules imposed by Jane’s anti-potty mouth campaign. When Aldo’s first word beside ‘Momma’ and ‘Papa’ had been ‘fuck’ the crack-down had begun.
"Don’t change the subject, you little shit. Are you gonna call Sara, or do I have to kick your ass?" Linc lifted his leg and stretched it over to land his foot heavily just below Michael’s displayed ass.
Michael looked into his brother’s face. "I’ll call her."
"You promise?" Linc demanded.
"I promise," Michael said, though his stomach knotted into a thousand ropes of pain.
~*~
Sara’s relief when Michael called could be heard by her neighbors in a scream of delight that she let loose after she hung up the phone. Then she promptly ran to the bathroom, as quickly as a woman in her condition could run, and hopped in the shower. He was bringing a pizza over and would be there in just a little while, so she had to look casual, but not too casual. She’d have just enough time to wash and dry her hair and put on her newest white maternity blouse she’d just bought the day before.
There was nothing she could do to disguise her girth any longer, not at 27 weeks, but the shirt she’d found at Target the day before at least made her feel feminine.
An hour later, when she opened the door to let him in, she smiled as big as she could manage to show him that the crazy weeper from the week before had departed. She had come home, cried all night practically, but then knew she just couldn’t leave it like that. She didn’t know what could happen between them at this stage, but she knew she didn’t want it to end with him sitting alone in a diner with a half-eaten turkey sandwich. "Come on in," she said enthusiastically.
The pizza was a take-n-bake, so he said, "Point me towards your kitchen, would you?" and she led him through the swinging door into the bright kitchen of her apartment.
He pulled the plastic wrap off the pizza and Sara leaned over his arm to see what the temperature setting was on the instruction sheet. "425," she read aloud, and then she pivoted towards the stove. "Thanks for bringing dinner. Now I owe you two meals," she said conversationally.
"I told you on the phone not to worry about that," Michael said, sliding the pizza in as she opened the oven door.
She watched him as he straightened. Today he wore a short-sleeved crew neck t-shirt, so she could see the tattoos dancing along his arms. Restraining herself from reaching out to trace them with her fingertips, she looked up into his eyes to find him watching her intently. "I know. We agreed apologies were done, right?" she asked.
"Right," Michael nodded. "And while we’re establishing boundaries, let me just get this out of the way-Sara, I’m not looking for anything, you know, romantic."
Sara shook her head, having already prepared a similar statement while she was in the shower. "No, I know, me either."
"I think I really could just use a friend. Someone besides Lincoln, you know, who’s only kind of love is tough love. He threatened to kick my ass if I didn’t call you."
Sara laughed, because she could hear Michael’s brother’s gruff voice in her head. "I could use a friend too," she acknowledged. "One of the things I decided when I decided to have this baby," she smoothed her hand over her belly, "was that I would focus 100% on being a good mom, and doing all of this right, for her, you know? I didn’t exactly swear off romantic entanglements, but then how many men want to date a pregnant lady?"
With great care, Michael reached a hand out and rested his fingers over her hand. "If they were smart, they’d want it really bad," he said softly, his eyes on their hands. Then he lifted his gaze to her face. "But how about an uncle for this baby? I’m a good uncle."
Sara’s breath had seized up in her lungs, but she forced herself to release it, and though it came out shaky and distressingly girly-like, she said, "Uncles are good."
"In that case, I brought the dinner-you were going to provide the movie. So what are we watching?"
Sara grinned, and then twisted her hand around on her belly so her fingers could snag his. "Have you ever seen Somewhere in Time?" she asked.
"Uh..." Michael was quiet for a moment as she led him back into the living room. "Is that the one where he finds the penny in his pocket and--"
"Don’t tell me!" she interrupted. "I’ve always heard about it, that he goes back in time somehow and that’s how they meet, but I’ve never watched it, and it’s on TCM tonight, so I thought, instead of something on pay-per-view, we could watch that."
As she grabbed the remote and then sat next to him on the sofa, his arm came up to lay against the back of it, not behind her, because she made sure she was a good distance down the couch from him-because of the ‘just friends’ edict they’d established. "I remember watching it, years ago. I’m pretty sure Veronica forced me and Linc to watch it. It’s a girl movie."
Sara smiled. "Well, next time, we can watch a guy movie, okay?"
Michael returned the smile, inclining his head slightly. "That’s what friends, do, right?" he asked. "Trade off? Right?"
Sara tore her eyes away and looked back at the television. She was pretty sure that was what people in relationships did, but she tried not to dwell on that too much.
~*~
As the movie wound up, Sara’s sniffles got louder. When the credits started rolling, Michael, who had carefully not looked over at her, was caught unawares when she hit his shoulder, hard, with her fist.
He paused in mid-stretch to pick up the empty pizza plates. "Hey!" he cried in surprised outrage.
"How could you let me watch that movie?" she asked, tears streaming down her face.
Baffled, Michael pointed at the TV. "It was your idea."
"But you knew," she sobbed, covering her face with her hands. As her crying escalated, Michael realized she was really upset, not just having a normal womanly reaction to the tragic ending of the film. She said something else into her palms, but he couldn’t understand a word of it with her tears and fingers blocking the words from his ears.
Awkwardly, he reached over and patted her back. "It’s just a movie, Sara," he said softly, remembering Lincoln’s ‘fuckin’ crazy’ remark from the day before.
"No," she moaned in a grief-stricken voice, "no, it’s not..." Her body was tipping over, he thought, perhaps the weight of the baby and set her off-center, but he suddenly realized she was leaning towards him, and before he could either get closer or get away, her face was planted against his pant leg, and the plethora of tears quickly soaked his Dockers.
He covered her head with both hands, stroking her hair as she shook her head back and forth against his thigh. He was worried about her emotional state, but that worry quickly became overshadowed by his concern for his own physical state. The movie had had a rather tasteful love scene in it, nothing graphic, but for whatever reason-perhaps his 3 year long celibate state, or the fact that Sara turned him on quite easily and he had just made a ridiculous ‘friends only’ pledge to her-but the love scene had definitely affected his libido. Simmering just below the surface was a strong desire to scoop her face up into his hands and kiss her tears away. After that, he wanted to pull the gauzy white blouse she wore from her body and examine the changes pregnancy had brought, and more than anything, he wanted to tug her black lounge pants right off and kiss her deeply, until he was sure that her scent had never faded from his memory any more than the beauty of her body or the softness of her skin had.
Shifting as casually as he could, he edged her face down closer to his knee, and leaned over slightly so his face was near her ear. "Sweetheart, it’s all right. You’re just super sensitive. You know you’d never react this way normally. Here," he whispered, getting his fingers under her chin to lift her face up. "Look at me. It’s all right, see?" He smiled into her red, puffy eyes. "Maybe we could watch a funny movie, and then you’ll laugh so hard you’ll cry, okay? I won’t leave you here like this."
Her eyes cleared then, an awareness coming into them that brought his cock to full attention. This hadn’t been his intention, either; if anything, he’d been trying to get her away from him so she wouldn’t notice the bulge growing his pants. Then, just as quickly, Sara pulled back from him, looking everywhere but directly at him, and got to her feet. "I’m so sorry, Michael. You must think I’m a complete idiot-"
She disappeared into the bathroom, and he could hear her blowing her nose. When she didn’t come back right away, he got up and adjusted the front of his pants before walking over to the slightly ajar bathroom door. "It’s all right. It’s a sad movie. I think you’re just having extreme reactions to everything. I’d even try to take credit for it," he murmured, "but Linc said pregnancy someti-"
She reappeared in the doorway and interrupted, tissue in hand, "Oh, yeah, it’s definitely the pregnancy, but I still feel like an idiot."
"You’re not," he said softly, restraining his twitching hand from reaching up to touch her face. "You’re not an idiot-you’re just pregnant. I understand."
She smiled, a shaky smile, but a smile nonetheless. "I appreciate you being so understanding, really I do, but maybe we should call it a night."
Michael nodded, feeling relieved. One could only expect a man in his condition to put up with so much temptation, and two and half hours seemed to be his limit.
As he walked down to the El station from her apartment a few minutes later, he convinced himself that each time he saw her, it would get better, easier. Eventually he’d be able to sit in her apartment and not imagine spreading her legs to go down on her. Eventually he’d just see her as the friend he was trying to make her become. Eventually he’d just feel about her the way she felt about him.
~*~
Sara’s dreams that night were terrible and disjointed, wonderful and short-lived. She awoke four times, each time breathing heavily from either the terror of Michael disappearing before her eyes ala Somewhere In Time style, or from the brink of orgasm, or from tears that started to fall before she even awoke completely to an insane happiness that even her subconscious realized was false.
When she finally got up at 6am, giving up the fight of sleeping at all, she felt more stupid than she had after she ran from the diner on the first night she and Michael had met up. She couldn’t imagine spending more time with him if every time was going to end in some sort of crazy emotional hurricane, yet the idea of not seeing him again was more painful than anything she’d ever felt before, even his abandonment in Panama.
That was the sad truth; she wanted him somehow, any way she could get him. If they were going to be friends, then she just had to find away to make it work, because she couldn’t continue to behave like this and think he’d put up with it. He was a man, after all. Emotional psychosis, even pregnancy related, was only tolerable for so long, and she knew if she was irritated by it, he couldn’t be far behind, though she was sure Michael had more patience than she ever dreamed of having.
So she went to work and worried about it for two more days before she finally called him. He sounded happy to hear from her, he asked if she’d recovered from the trauma of the film with a laugh and then invited her to his apartment, which he’d only moved into a month previously. "Linc would have been fine with me living with him forever, but I think Jane was really over it, so I’ve got a place near downtown. It’s right up from a Starbucks, so it’s a good location."
When she hung up the phone, she folded the piece of paper with the directions on it and slipped it into her purse. Then she sat down and cried again. Her mother had often said be careful what you wish for because you just might get it, and she finally understood that meaning. After Michael had left her in Panama, all she had wished for was to know that he was all right. So eight months later, a letter came. Then for two years, she wished that she could just see him again, and that maybe he would apologize, and that maybe she could know he was happy. Then she wished he would believe her when she said she wanted to be friends, and that he would buy that she’d cried a river over a 30 year old movie because she was pregnant, not because watching a love story about two people who only had one perfect night together and then were ripped apart by circumstances beyond their control reminded her all too well that she sat on a sofa with a man she loved desperately. She now realized she always would, even though she had tried to stop, to move on, to have a child that had no father, but she’d told herself, didn’t need one anyway. And he wanted nothing from her except a simple, expectation-free friendship. He wanted it so much he was willing to put up with her craziness, because his only alternative was Lincoln, Jane and their two kids.
When she arrived at his apartment, the idea that she was his only friend quickly evaporated, because Lincoln’s oldest son, LJ, was there. She hadn’t seen him since Panama, and so they had happy but slightly awkward reunion as LJ was just on his way out the door.
"He just came up for the weekend," Michael explained once his nephew had left. "He’s going to University of Illinois down in Champaign. We’re going to go catch a movie tomorrow."
"He looks like he’s doing great," Sara commented, dropping her purse and kicking her shoes off next to Michael’s bright red sofa.
"Oh, he is. He met this girl, Laura, last year at some computer seminar, and they’re already talking marriage. I was just trying to tell him he’s got his whole life, and there’s no reason to rush it, but you know kids." Michael waved her to come over into the kitchen portion of the front room, where he was chopping vegetables.
"How old is he now?" Sara asked, carefully getting herself up onto a barstool.
"He just turned 20. I don’t even know why he’s thinking about marriage. When I was 20, it was the last thing on my mind."
"Can I help?" she asked, pointing towards the cutting board he was using to cut up broccoli.
"No," he said, "this is the last of it. I hope you like stir fry." He picked up the cutting board and dumped the vegetables into the Wok on the stove.
"Sounds great," Sara said enthusiastically, her mother’s voice drifting somewhere over her head. As Michael chattered on about LJ, his studies, his girlfriend, and the supreme idiocy of the young, Sara knew she couldn’t do this. She wanted to, with all her heart, she wanted to be able to do it, to be capable of it, but it wasn’t in her to love Michael Scofield as a friend. It wasn’t in her to sit across a counter top from him and not want to embrace him. She could feel the love softening her neck muscles even, and her head tipped slightly as she studied him while he stirred soy sauce into the pan, still talking, but she didn’t hear anything he said. His eyes darted back and forth between what he was cooking and her face, and the short-sleeved shirt he wore today was a dark gray that stole the green and blue shades from his eyes, leaving them a murky, overcast-sky color that made her think of long rainy days in bed. His fingers moved deftly between seasoning bottles and wooden spoons, but she remembered them gliding carefully over her skin, and she felt her entire body heat up with the memory.
Her breasts had become more sensitive with her pregnancy, but now they tightened against the soft material of her bra, growing warm and firm. A slight ache developed between her thighs, and though she knew that the biological preparations her body was making, while out of her control for the moment, would never lead to lovemaking, she let her eyes drift shut while she listened, not to Michael’s words, but to the cadence of his voice, to the dark velvet quality of his tone.
It was the almost falling off the stool, and then jerking her eyes open to see that he had her in his arms and was moving her towards the sofa that brought her back to reality. "Michael?" she questioned, a little disoriented.
"I’ve got you," he murmured, his lips against her temple. And he did, one arm was under her thighs while the other cradled her shoulders against his chest. "You must have had a long day at work, huh? I should have come to your house to cook you dinner." He laid her out on the couch and then tugged the afghan off the back to lay it over her. His hand brushed her hair back from her cheek. "Why don’t you take a little nap? Dinner won’t be ready for a few minutes, anyway."
As his hand skated over the top of the afghan, and subsequently her belly, she reached up and grabbed it. "What happened, Michael?"
He was starting to straighten up from his crouched position by the sofa. "When?" he asked in return.
"What happened in Sona?"
She heard him sigh as well as felt the puff of air against her forehead. "Sara..." he shook his head, and her fear that he would never tell her seized her in an iron grasp. She had avoided even thinking about it, but it was the one thing she didn’t know that she needed to know. She needed to know what was so terrible that she hadn’t been enough, that her undiluted love couldn’t soften the horror of it for him.
She gripped his hand tightly, and scooted to sit up on the sofa. "Please," she begged, tears starting afresh of their own volition. "Please tell me."
Michael held up his free hand and said lowly, "Let me turn the stove off." When he came back a moment later, he had a box of Kleenex, which he set on her lap. Then he sat down next to her, but not right next to her. "Remember when I said I spent six months in Australia?" he asked.
Sara nodded, but wondered if this was just another way to avoid telling her.
"I saw a therapist while I was there, a good one. It helped a lot. Helped me come to terms with the way things were there. I lived in a society, and by the rules of that society, that was completely different than anything I’d ever known. In some ways, Fox River helped prepare me, but it couldn’t entirely, nothing could." He reached for one of Sara’s hands. "I don’t need to relive what happened there, and I won’t, not now, not when I’m finally able to put it behind me. All you need to know is I killed people in there; it was kill or be killed, and I killed. I did what I had to do to survive."
Stupified silence hovered over Sara briefly; she couldn’t believe that was what the problem was. Then she spluttered angrily, "I killed someone, Michael, remember? I was the reason you were even in there! But I didn’t push you away because of it!"
He sighed heavily. "I know. I know. But...my brain doesn’t work like everyone else’s, it’s hard to explain..."
"I know about the LLI," she said vehemently, all gentleness gone from her heart for the moment, so much so, she hardly took in his look of shock at this revelation. "I talked to the shrink you saw before you came to Fox River. But what about me, Michael? What about me! You went into that place because of me, and then you left me, because of me! I don’t care how your brain works! If you loved me, at all, like you said you did, you wouldn’t have done what you did to me!"
Jerking her hand from his, she shook the afghan off of herself and got agitatedly to her feet. He wasn’t looking at her anyway, instead he stared at a point on the floor between his shoes. "Why wasn’t I enough?" she cried.
His head came up then, and the tortured quality of his eyes dented the hardness that had suddenly enveloped her heart. "Sara..."
"Do you see this?" she asked waving her arm back and forth between them. "Do you see the irony of this? We’re here now, and you’ll be my friend, even though I’m apparently crazy, but you couldn’t just tell me what was wrong then? Why, Michael? Why? Why couldn’t you just let me be with you, even if I just had to follow you from Brazil to Europe to fucking Australia? I would have, you know. I would have gone anywhere, and waited however long I had to, just so I knew you were okay."
He stood up abruptly. "I wasn’t okay, Sara! I wasn’t okay for a long time. You being there wouldn’t have changed anything, except you would have grown to hate me for not being able to tell you, for not being able to explain it."
"You think I don’t hate you now? Now that you’re back, and you’re fine, and you’re my friend, and I’m going to have a baby, and you’ll be the uncle? You think I don’t hate you for that?" She gulped air as the voracious words tumbled from her lips.
His eyes narrowed and he flinched back, because obviously that hadn’t occurred to him. "What are you doing here, then? If you hate me so much, if you can’t stand this arrangement that we’ve had for all of a week, what the hell are you doing here?"
The baby kicked right then, hard, and Sara clutched at her belly because of it. "I really am crazy," she murmured, turning away from him. "That’s the only logical explanation."
"Are you all right?" he asked, hovering over her suddenly, his arm outstretched towards her abdomen.
She slapped his hand away. "I’m fine!" she snapped. "I’m just dandy. I can’t do this," she exclaimed, the words all but forcibly jumping from her mouth. "I can’t be here like this with you, I just can’t."
She marched barefooted and purse-less towards his front door, because she really wasn’t thinking clearly at the moment, but he followed close behind her, grabbing at her arm even as she swatted at him again. "Sara, you can’t just leave-"
"Watch me!" she yelled, but then he got a good grip on her arm and spun her so her back was to the door.
Pinning her there, his hands against her shoulders, he said in a voice much too calm for Sara’s spinning emotions. "Let me at least take you-"
She lifted her arms, attempting to shove him back and said, "Oh, nooooo, I don’t think so, this isn’t a date gone badly, this is a fight between friends, right? Just let me slam out of here, and I’m sure in a couple days we can act like it never happened at all!"
"I’d really appreciate it if you’d stop saying the word ‘friend’ like it’s ‘shit’," he growled, pushing his hands against her shoulders roughly. "You may not have meant it, but I did. I wanted us to be friends, but if it’s not possible, I understand."
She still had her closed fists pressed to his chest and she smacked him hard before saying, "Quit being so fucking understanding, Michael. Quit acting like you want me here, when if you’d ever really wanted me, you’d have fought for me!"
His expression defied definition, he looked beyond incredulous, beyond pissed. Where the calm had rested only moments before, he now looked like someone Sara had never seen before. "Are you kidding me?" he asked, moving closer, plucking her hands from his chest like they were the hands of a small child. He spun her around so that her belly wasn’t between them, and then he shoved his hips against her ass. She gasped as she felt the heat and hardness of his erection pressed between her buttocks, and when he thrust against her, she couldn’t fight the moan of longing that gurgled in her throat. "You need to be convinced? I’ve ached for you for three years, Sara. You want the truth? It’s only gotten worse since I saw you on the El, and then I had to get brave enough to talk to you, but now the ache in my gut seems livable compared to the ache in my chest."
Sara’s hands were braced on the door, but she no longer had any desire to walk through it. Her tears had receded with her anger, but now they blinded her as she felt consumed by the emotions Michael Scofield evoked in her. Loving him and hating him were so interconnected now, she wasn’t sure which she felt more, but in that moment with his body pressed tightly to hers, all she wanted to focus on was the need. She needed him, even if she hated him, even if she loved him. She needed him, in the barest sense of the word. And now that she knew he needed her too, she couldn’t imagine walking out the door. "Michael..." she gasped at the same moment his hands moved from where they gripped her arms. His fingers snaked under the hem of her long shirt and caressed up the slope of her belly until her breasts were in his palms, bare and beaded to his touch, her bra magically disintegrating under his hands.
"Please," he breathed against her earlobe, and she almost laughed. Did he really think she had the strength to say no?
Arching in his grasp, she ground her ass back into him and said the only word either of them wanted to hear. "Yes."
Chapter Two
http://domfangirlfic.livejournal.com/17141.html
Author:
domfangirl
Pairing/Characters: Michael/Sara, with an appearance by Lincoln
Genre: Post-escape (from Sona), angst, drama, fluff, humor
Rating: R (Language, implied sexual situations)
Summary: Michael and Sara haven't seen each other in three years, because he left her in Panama after he got out of Sona. Now circumstances bring them back together...and well, you'll have to read to find out what happens...
Author's Notes: This is written for the lovely and talented
msgenevieve as an exchange for her fantastic Linc/Jane story, Sleeping With Ghosts. The prompts she gave me were Post-Sona with Michael and Sara attempting to be *friends.* Don't ask me where the rest of it came from, but
saestina gave me a quick beta on the first portion and made me feel as if it were interesting. So if you don't like it, blame her. No, just kidding, all mistakes are mine. And, Jen, there will be NC-17, don't worry, it's just not until the next chapter. I had a lot of plot to lay down before they could...you know, lay down ;-)
Warnings: There are spoilers for the film Somewhere In Time in this piece. Additionally, all references to what happened to Michael in Sona are based on my own speculation, not spoilers or anything I've read about the show.
I wanna wrap the moon around us
Lay beside you, skin on skin
Make love 'til the sun comes up
'Til the sun goes down again
'Cause I need you
~from I Need You by Tim McGraw & Faith Hill
When Michael Scofield had climbed on board the El in the early afternoon, it had been relatively empty. Now, as the commuters piled on, he had to jerk his coat into his lap to make room for the African-American woman who attempted to sit down next to him without even asking him to get it out of her way. She sank onto the bench with a heavy sigh and promptly fell asleep with her chin against her chest while he wondered at her exhaustion. Dressed in a power suit, she obviously worked at one of the financial corporations in the downtown area, and due to her absolute ability to fall asleep despite being surrounded by hundreds of commuters, she must have been up since early that morning, or had just had a really exhausting day.
Michael remembered those days himself, when work knocked him out. Back when he had a job. Before Fox River. Before Sona.
He found himself worrying that his seatmate might miss her stop, but her head lifted about ten seconds before they announced the Randall Street exit, and she, having never said a word to him, picked up her briefcase and prepared to disembark as the train slowed.
Happy to have the seat to himself again, at least momentarily, he dropped his coat back into the empty spot. As the train lurched forward, he glanced up and saw a flash of red as someone sat down about four rows in front of him, sharing the bench seat with another woman. His fingers knotted in the material of his now-forgotten coat.
This was why he rode the El all day some days. Well, he didn’t have anything else to do, that was true, but he had this secret hope that one day, somehow, he might run into her. He knew she was back in Chicago, just like he was, but he hadn’t come up with any clever way to call her, or see her without looking like a total ass. Linc said he should just be a man and call, but Linc didn’t know Dr. Tancredi the way Michael did. She wasn’t as hard-nosed as she liked to think she was, but he had given her plenty of reason to become hard-nosed.
And he just wasn’t as brave as he used to be.
He’d seen her before, but not on this route. The times he’d seen her, she’d always been alone, but she’d also always been briskly walking somewhere once she got off the train, so he’d never followed her. He knew it was cowardice. But today, for whatever reason, he had chosen a route he’d never seen her on, and now here she was. If he didn’t take this chance, he ought to concede that fate might never hand him another opportunity.
She rode the train for almost 38 minutes. As the El slowed again, Michael had no idea what stop they were near, but he got to his feet as he watched her do the same. He scuttled forward, allowing a couple to go in front of him, but not losing sight of her hair. It was long again, hanging past her shoulders halfway down her back, and its natural color. As though she’d washed the dye and all that that dye had meant right out.
But of course she would have. It had been almost three years since he’d seen her. If he allowed himself to remember it correctly, the last time he’d seen her, her hair had been mostly red again anyway, the brown having faded in the Panamanian sun.
Now, he could see she had her own coat draped over her arm. It was early fall, and so on the train it was too warm for an outer layer, but getting off the train, and walking any distance would require something warmer than shirt sleeves. As the trail of people steadily made their way off the train, Michael managed to stay close behind her-but not too close, as he was unsure what he should do. Maybe he’d just stalk her to wherever she was going. He couldn’t see himself actually saying anything to her.
But he wanted to say something to her, and badly.
The few people that he had carefully let build up between them seemed to melt away, and then the brisk wind-the reason Chicago was called The Windy City-took a piece of paper right out of Sara’s hand as she swung her coat around her shoulders. What turned out to be a brochure landed squarely against his chest just as she pivoted, wildly groping for the paper, and Michael took in several things all at once. Her look of utter astonishment as her eyes fell on his face; how the sweater she wore fell across her rounded abdomen as her arms lifted slightly to ease into the sleeves of her coat; the words on the brochure his hand pulled from against his chest-"The Best Childbirth Class for You and Baby."
"Michael?" Sara Tancredi asked. It had been almost three years since he’d heard her voice, but it sounded just the same. Husky and sweet, the tone curled through him, and though the sight of her pregnant belly had sent stabbing pains through his chest, her voice erased some of the pangs. "Oh, my God! Michael!" she gasped, accepting that it was him, though he’d made no response. When he offered the brochure back to her, she laughed joyfully and threw herself against his chest. "Oh, Michael!" she whispered, her cheek brushing past his as her arms surrounded his shoulders.
It seemed to take him forever to respond, his arms moving like they were underwater, slowly circling her, slowly pulling her tightly to him, slowly bringing her and her baby into the place in his mind where he would never forget how they both felt against his body.
"Hello, Sara," he said stiffly, though his body willingly accepted her weight against it. The embrace was only awkward in his mind, because she clung to him just as she had the day he finally emerged from Sona.
She pulled back, her hands sliding from around his neck to touch his face gently. The look in her eyes told him she wasn’t trusting what she was seeing, so she used her soft, competent doctor’s hands to feel for herself that he was there. "How are you?" she asked enthusiastically.
"I’m well, I’m well," he murmured, pushing her back just a little, just enough that her rounded belly wasn’t pressing into his abdomen. "And you? You look like you’re doing great," he said, and then without his permission, his hand reached out and palmed the protruding part of her anatomy. The whole reason he’d pushed her back was so he didn’t have to feel it, and now he had his hand on it. What the hell was wrong with him?
She laughed again, and her hand joined his on her belly. "Well, yes, I am doing great."
"How far along are you?" he asked, pulling back, disengaging slowly but completely from her touch.
"Six months," she said. "She’s going to be a Christmas baby."
"Ah," Michael said, and out of nowhere the words, "Poor planning on your part," popped out. The fact that he even thought it at all galled him; he didn’t need to imagine Sara in a moment of mad passion with-who?-that had resulted in this pregnancy.
She laughed again-and he wished he’d stayed on the train. Yes, he’d wanted to see her, he’d imagined the scenario a thousand times where he at least got to apologize for his disappearing act in Panama, but he didn’t want to see this. He didn’t want to hear her happy laughter for every aspect of her life that didn’t involve him at all. "Oh, no, not poor planning at all. I purposely did all of this, the date too. It’s probably silly," she dropped his gaze to look at her own hand rubbing over her stomach, "but I’m hoping she’ll be born on the 21st of December. That was my dad’s birthday-so. You know. Just silly. There’s of course no way to know for sure."
"Depending on the whims of fate, are you?" he asked, his eyes roaming over her now that she wasn’t looking directly at him. She’d always been beautiful, he’d known that; he’d been able to see that quite easily, but now, at the height of pregnancy, he was certain he’d never seen her look better. Even the glow his memory had tried to capture of how beautiful she’d looked as he’d made love to her didn’t contain this type of radiance, and he was sure his abrupt departure had stolen any meaning for her from that. Truthfully, his abrupt departure had stolen the beauty of the moment from him as well.
Lifting a hand to push back her windswept hair, she raised her gaze back to his. "Yes, I found that plans don’t always go the way you expect them too." There was no censure in her gaze or in her tone, but Michael’s heart shriveled just a bit in his chest anyway. "How is Lincoln?" she inquired, her voice changing perceptibly, as though she couldn’t believe she’d been standing there for all of 60 seconds without asking that important question.
Michael paused briefly, but then told the truth. After all, wasn’t it ironic? "Linc’s great, doing fantastically, really. He and Jane just had another baby, as a matter of fact."
"Another baby?"
"Yes, they’ve got two little ones now. A boy and a girl. Very productive, my brother," Michael said, grinning unapologetically. "He’s got a great life. He’s got everything he should have ever had."
"That’s wonderful to hear, I thought they might get married when we were in Panama," Sara replied, her eyes searching his face. "What about you? Do you have a great life, too?"
The smile that Michael forced his lips into was neither natural nor comfortable, especially following the gleeful expression he’d had while speaking of his brother. To his credit he didn’t try to lie, he just evaded the question. "Not as good as you, obviously. I’ve not gotten married, and I don’t have any pending Christmas babies."
Sara pursed her lips, looking faintly embarrassed. Michael would have asked what was wrong, but the blush that stole into her cheeks sucked the air from his lungs and reminded him of the night when the rush of blood beneath her skin had turned her to live roses beneath his fingertips. She had been velvet under his hands, and the scent he had longed for in the unending dankness of Sona. She had been the perfect flower beneath him, but he’d still cut her lose, unable to fathom a time when he could stand to be in the presence of such beauty. "I’m not married, either," she said, dipping her head slightly. Then she lifted her chin and announced, "I’m 33 years old. I wanted to have a baby. So I went to a sperm bank."
His relief was something akin to unspeakable joy, because he literally could not respond to her. It wasn’t even because he thought they could ever be together, but just knowing that it hadn’t turned out picture perfect for her after the fact helped him to not feel so alone. He loved his brother, and he loved Jane, Lincoln’s ass-kicking-turned-domestic wife, but sometimes their picket-fenced life was nothing but a reminder that he had pushed away the only person he’d ever wanted to share a similar life with.
"Yeah, that’s usually a conversation killer," Sara offered with slight amusement creasing her face. "Why people would be more comfortable knowing some guy knocked me up and ran off and left me than to know I chose this is really strange.
"I wouldn’t be more comfortable knowing some guy knocked you up, Michael thought bitterly, because I’d be that guy, on some level anyway. Aloud he reasoned, "It’s surprising, is all. I don’t think people would look at you and see someone who would need to parent alone. I’m sure there are plenty of men willing to father your child."
He didn’t know why he said it. As soon as it was out of his mouth, he knew he’d just given her the perfect opportunity. But he couldn’t even flinch from it, couldn’t disagree, couldn’t do anything except let her say it, let her feel it, let it soak the air between them. "Well, the one I wanted wasn’t interested," she said quietly, again without accusation. She paused a moment and then asked, "You busy? Want to get a bite?"
His speechlessness didn’t last as long this time. "Sure," he found himself answering, as she pointed up the track towards the train station with a tilt of her head. Following close behind her, he only wondered how he could possibly choke food past the giant lump in his throat.
~*~
Sara Tancredi had decided long ago that her life would only be what she made of it. Sure she could sit around bemoaning the fact that Michael Scofield had left her high and dry in Panama, or she could get on with her life. She could lose herself in a bottle of whiskey or up a hypodermic needle, she could sit around thinking about all the people who she had lost, or she could just get up and move.
So that’s what she’d done. She’d gotten up and moved, until moving felt natural and good again. The day she decided to create her own family, she had cried tears of joy for finally having the strength and courage to make her life what she wanted instead of waiting for something to happen.
So waiting changed from an idyllic fantasy where Michael came back and begged for her to forgive him and take him back (which she always did, but only after he’d really sweated it out) to waiting to see if the artificial insemination took, to waiting to see if the sonogram showed a boy or a girl, to waiting for December to arrive and knowing her little bundle of joy wasn’t far behind.
As she got off the El train, on her way home from her monthly doctor’s appointment, she ran into him, and the happiness she felt at seeing him was something she suspected would be similar to what she would feel the first time she held her child in her arms.
But as she invited him to dinner, she told herself it was only because she needed to know he was all right, that he hadn’t drowned under what Sona had done to him, that he hadn’t disappeared from the earth as surely as he had from her life.
And so they talked. Well, mostly he talked while she ate, because she couldn’t go longer than two hours without either a snack or a restroom, and when she prodded him to eat his meal, he blanched a little and said, "I’m not eating for two, guess I’m not as hungry."
She eyed his turkey sandwich covetously. "I could probably eat your meal too, without batting an eyelid. But I’ve made a deal with myself that I only eat until I’m not starving anymore, as opposed to stuffing myself. Otherwise I’ll end up weighing 250 pounds before this baby’s born."
He scoffed, and pushed his plate towards her. "You look great. I say eat if you want to."
She waggled a finger at him. "No, no, Scofield, do not enable me. You have to help me stay strong." She flashed a smile as he tugged his plate back towards his chest. "So, no luck finding a job?" she asked.
"Well, like a mentioned, I can get a job, but it’s the incessant questions and people wanting to see the tats that really just drive me crazy. I’ve had four different jobs since I’ve been back, but I’ve left each of them, for similar reasons." She imagined he wore long sleeved shirts like the green one he currently had on all the time just because of that.
Thinking about his tattoos had always caused her stomach to pitch lustfully, and his casual mentioning of them proved time hadn’t changed that simple fact. Sara picked up her last French fry, feigning nonchalance. "When did you come back to Chicago?" she asked.
He dropped her gaze and fiddled with one of his own fries. "Over a year ago."
Her chest tightened. She’d known he had no intention of contacting her, ever, but knowing he’d been back that long confirmed it for her. Instead of dwelling on that, she asked another question. "Where were you before that?"
"All over. South America for a while. Then I went to Europe; I spent six months in Australia. I hung around South Africa for a while even. But finally, Linc wanted me to come home. He wanted me to be a part of his kids’ lives. I couldn’t say no." He picked up a fry and ate it, his gaze wandering over to her empty plate for a moment before scooping up a few of his potatoes and dropping them in front of her. "You can’t say no either," he said as she opened her mouth. "A few extra won’t hurt you, and I won’t eat all of them. Can’t waste ‘em."
She picked up a potato in agreement, but said, "If you aren’t happy here, Michael, you can say no. You deserve to be happy too."
He shook his head and looked around the crowded diner they sat in. "I wasn’t happy anywhere, so at least now I’m near my family."
Sara wanted to ask him so many questions. She remembered how he’d been when he came out of Sona, how he hadn’t wanted to talk, but instead he’d just wanted her close, wanted to lie in the silence together, or create a heated vacuum where the only sounds were moans of pleasure from both of them. He hadn’t wanted to tell her then what was wrong, and because he never had, she hadn’t been all that surprised to find him gone one morning, gone without a trace. Devastated, yes, surprised, no.
"I’m sorry, Sara," he said quietly, bringing his eyes back to hers. The intensity that had always been a part of him, what she knew to be determination while in Fox River had become desperation in the aftermath of Sona. Now it just seemed to be apologetic resignation. "I’m sorry I just left. I should have tried to explain, but I didn’t have the words. I still don’t really, except that you have to know it was me, and my messed up head, not you, or anything you did."
Oddly enough, she did know that, that was the part that she’d always understood, and that was why she’d forgiven him almost minutes after she’d found him gone. Now, she just nodded, afraid to speak and ruin the confidence building between them, as well as display the tears gathering in her throat.
"When I came out, all I wanted was you, and I just thought if I could lose myself in you, the rest wouldn’t matter. But that wasn’t true. I started to feel like I was getting it all over you, you know, I was getting the shit that was all over me, all over you, and I just couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t plan it, for once," he smirked at the irony. "I just woke up that morning and packed the duffle bag and left. I was in Brazil before I really knew what I’d done, and by then it was too late to write a letter."
Sara cleared her throat as he paused. "But you did write a letter, it was just to Linc instead of me."
Michael, in the process of lifting a hand to rub over his head, froze. "You were still in Panama, then?" he asked.
"I waited. I waited for eight months. Then the letter came, and we all knew you weren’t coming back. So we packed up and came home. I was only here a few months before I went back to India, I did more volunteer work for about a year, and then I came back again, to Chicago, because it’s my home. I even saw Linc and Jane then; that was just after Aldo was born. But you still weren’t back, and Linc didn’t think you’d be back any time soon."
He dropped his hand exhaustedly to the tabletop. "Have you been in touch with Linc all along?" he asked, and she heard the suspicion in his voice instantly.
"No," she answered quickly, and it was the truth. "That was the last time I saw them, when the baby was just a few months old." She glanced at the waitress who walked past them, but didn’t interrupt their conversation. "It was kind of hard to see them. They were really happy, and…" she trailed off.
"What?" Michael probed, reaching across the table to skim his fingers against the back of her hand.
Sara tensed at that light touch. It was nothing, his long fingers barely even touched the top of her knuckles, but it was enough, just the effort of him trying to touch her, to send bolts of longing shooting through her. "That’s when I started thinking about having a baby on my own," she answered, clearing her throat again. "It took me a long time to know for sure it was the right thing, but I still think it was seeing your brother and his family that day that helped the idea to germinate." Sara sighed, pushing the plate in front of her to the left. She wasn’t hungry anymore, in fact, she was starting to feel a little maudlin, and she knew that as much as they needed to talk about these things, she could only take so much. If it were only his light touch on her hand, or his sorrowful eyes, or the knowledge that all this was too little, too late, that would be one thing; but it was all of those things all at once, and she’d noticed she had become hyper emotional with her pregnancy anyway. She needed to get home, and be alone, so she could sob out loud at the ‘whims of fate’ as Michael had called them.
His forefinger circled over the soft skin on the back of her hand and he all but whispered, "I’m sorry. That’s all I can say, Sara. I’m sorry."
Scooting to the edge of the booth, she wrenched her hand from under his and got to her feet as quickly as her burgeoning belly and the edge of the table would let her. "I know you are, Michael. Believe me," she said, a sob catching in her throat as the tears she tried to hold back flooded unheeded towards the surface. "I know. But I need to go. I’m sorry, too."
She felt as ungraceful as a hippopotamus at a ballet, but she somehow got on her feet and got to the door of the diner before she thought about her half of the bill.
The bell rang over her head as she pushed out into the late September evening. The least he owed her was one dinner. She figured he could pick up the tab.
~*~
"You’re an ass," Lincoln said, looking at his brother with ill-concealed contempt.
Michael looked up from his prone position on Linc’s sofa. "Thanks, big brother," he snapped back.
"Just call her. She was upset. Trust me, pregnant women, they’re fuckin’ crazy. She probably went home and cried and now she feels better. If you call her, like you should have a fuckin’ year ago, she’ll be thrilled. You said she was so happy to see you." Linc cuffed Michael on the head like they were both much younger and then sat down in the overstuffed chair next to the sofa.
"I didn’t have a chance to get her number," Michael mumbled into his elbow. He lay on his stomach on the sofa with his head cradled on his folded arms.
"Hey, jackass, ever heard of a phone book? There’s only one Tancredi in the Oak Park area. She’s easy enough to find. Or you could go to her fuckin’ office. I told you when you first got back, she opened a private practice." Lincoln lifted his feet and planted them on the coffee table.
Michael only grunted a response.
"Hey, I’ve got an idea. We’ll pretend we’re in still in fuckin’ junior high, and I’ll call her and pretend I’m you, and I’ll set something up and then I won’t have to look at you and your hang dog expression all day, every fuckin’ day."
Michael cast a disparaging glance at his brother. "Do you have to swear so much?"
"Until Jane gets home with the kids, I’m saying ‘fuck’ as many times as I can. I’m running out of quarters to put in her consequence jar." Lincoln pointed to a jar sitting on top of the television that was half full of shiny coins.
"At least you guys will be able to take a nice vacation next summer, huh?" Michael asked, laughing quietly at the rules imposed by Jane’s anti-potty mouth campaign. When Aldo’s first word beside ‘Momma’ and ‘Papa’ had been ‘fuck’ the crack-down had begun.
"Don’t change the subject, you little shit. Are you gonna call Sara, or do I have to kick your ass?" Linc lifted his leg and stretched it over to land his foot heavily just below Michael’s displayed ass.
Michael looked into his brother’s face. "I’ll call her."
"You promise?" Linc demanded.
"I promise," Michael said, though his stomach knotted into a thousand ropes of pain.
~*~
Sara’s relief when Michael called could be heard by her neighbors in a scream of delight that she let loose after she hung up the phone. Then she promptly ran to the bathroom, as quickly as a woman in her condition could run, and hopped in the shower. He was bringing a pizza over and would be there in just a little while, so she had to look casual, but not too casual. She’d have just enough time to wash and dry her hair and put on her newest white maternity blouse she’d just bought the day before.
There was nothing she could do to disguise her girth any longer, not at 27 weeks, but the shirt she’d found at Target the day before at least made her feel feminine.
An hour later, when she opened the door to let him in, she smiled as big as she could manage to show him that the crazy weeper from the week before had departed. She had come home, cried all night practically, but then knew she just couldn’t leave it like that. She didn’t know what could happen between them at this stage, but she knew she didn’t want it to end with him sitting alone in a diner with a half-eaten turkey sandwich. "Come on in," she said enthusiastically.
The pizza was a take-n-bake, so he said, "Point me towards your kitchen, would you?" and she led him through the swinging door into the bright kitchen of her apartment.
He pulled the plastic wrap off the pizza and Sara leaned over his arm to see what the temperature setting was on the instruction sheet. "425," she read aloud, and then she pivoted towards the stove. "Thanks for bringing dinner. Now I owe you two meals," she said conversationally.
"I told you on the phone not to worry about that," Michael said, sliding the pizza in as she opened the oven door.
She watched him as he straightened. Today he wore a short-sleeved crew neck t-shirt, so she could see the tattoos dancing along his arms. Restraining herself from reaching out to trace them with her fingertips, she looked up into his eyes to find him watching her intently. "I know. We agreed apologies were done, right?" she asked.
"Right," Michael nodded. "And while we’re establishing boundaries, let me just get this out of the way-Sara, I’m not looking for anything, you know, romantic."
Sara shook her head, having already prepared a similar statement while she was in the shower. "No, I know, me either."
"I think I really could just use a friend. Someone besides Lincoln, you know, who’s only kind of love is tough love. He threatened to kick my ass if I didn’t call you."
Sara laughed, because she could hear Michael’s brother’s gruff voice in her head. "I could use a friend too," she acknowledged. "One of the things I decided when I decided to have this baby," she smoothed her hand over her belly, "was that I would focus 100% on being a good mom, and doing all of this right, for her, you know? I didn’t exactly swear off romantic entanglements, but then how many men want to date a pregnant lady?"
With great care, Michael reached a hand out and rested his fingers over her hand. "If they were smart, they’d want it really bad," he said softly, his eyes on their hands. Then he lifted his gaze to her face. "But how about an uncle for this baby? I’m a good uncle."
Sara’s breath had seized up in her lungs, but she forced herself to release it, and though it came out shaky and distressingly girly-like, she said, "Uncles are good."
"In that case, I brought the dinner-you were going to provide the movie. So what are we watching?"
Sara grinned, and then twisted her hand around on her belly so her fingers could snag his. "Have you ever seen Somewhere in Time?" she asked.
"Uh..." Michael was quiet for a moment as she led him back into the living room. "Is that the one where he finds the penny in his pocket and--"
"Don’t tell me!" she interrupted. "I’ve always heard about it, that he goes back in time somehow and that’s how they meet, but I’ve never watched it, and it’s on TCM tonight, so I thought, instead of something on pay-per-view, we could watch that."
As she grabbed the remote and then sat next to him on the sofa, his arm came up to lay against the back of it, not behind her, because she made sure she was a good distance down the couch from him-because of the ‘just friends’ edict they’d established. "I remember watching it, years ago. I’m pretty sure Veronica forced me and Linc to watch it. It’s a girl movie."
Sara smiled. "Well, next time, we can watch a guy movie, okay?"
Michael returned the smile, inclining his head slightly. "That’s what friends, do, right?" he asked. "Trade off? Right?"
Sara tore her eyes away and looked back at the television. She was pretty sure that was what people in relationships did, but she tried not to dwell on that too much.
~*~
As the movie wound up, Sara’s sniffles got louder. When the credits started rolling, Michael, who had carefully not looked over at her, was caught unawares when she hit his shoulder, hard, with her fist.
He paused in mid-stretch to pick up the empty pizza plates. "Hey!" he cried in surprised outrage.
"How could you let me watch that movie?" she asked, tears streaming down her face.
Baffled, Michael pointed at the TV. "It was your idea."
"But you knew," she sobbed, covering her face with her hands. As her crying escalated, Michael realized she was really upset, not just having a normal womanly reaction to the tragic ending of the film. She said something else into her palms, but he couldn’t understand a word of it with her tears and fingers blocking the words from his ears.
Awkwardly, he reached over and patted her back. "It’s just a movie, Sara," he said softly, remembering Lincoln’s ‘fuckin’ crazy’ remark from the day before.
"No," she moaned in a grief-stricken voice, "no, it’s not..." Her body was tipping over, he thought, perhaps the weight of the baby and set her off-center, but he suddenly realized she was leaning towards him, and before he could either get closer or get away, her face was planted against his pant leg, and the plethora of tears quickly soaked his Dockers.
He covered her head with both hands, stroking her hair as she shook her head back and forth against his thigh. He was worried about her emotional state, but that worry quickly became overshadowed by his concern for his own physical state. The movie had had a rather tasteful love scene in it, nothing graphic, but for whatever reason-perhaps his 3 year long celibate state, or the fact that Sara turned him on quite easily and he had just made a ridiculous ‘friends only’ pledge to her-but the love scene had definitely affected his libido. Simmering just below the surface was a strong desire to scoop her face up into his hands and kiss her tears away. After that, he wanted to pull the gauzy white blouse she wore from her body and examine the changes pregnancy had brought, and more than anything, he wanted to tug her black lounge pants right off and kiss her deeply, until he was sure that her scent had never faded from his memory any more than the beauty of her body or the softness of her skin had.
Shifting as casually as he could, he edged her face down closer to his knee, and leaned over slightly so his face was near her ear. "Sweetheart, it’s all right. You’re just super sensitive. You know you’d never react this way normally. Here," he whispered, getting his fingers under her chin to lift her face up. "Look at me. It’s all right, see?" He smiled into her red, puffy eyes. "Maybe we could watch a funny movie, and then you’ll laugh so hard you’ll cry, okay? I won’t leave you here like this."
Her eyes cleared then, an awareness coming into them that brought his cock to full attention. This hadn’t been his intention, either; if anything, he’d been trying to get her away from him so she wouldn’t notice the bulge growing his pants. Then, just as quickly, Sara pulled back from him, looking everywhere but directly at him, and got to her feet. "I’m so sorry, Michael. You must think I’m a complete idiot-"
She disappeared into the bathroom, and he could hear her blowing her nose. When she didn’t come back right away, he got up and adjusted the front of his pants before walking over to the slightly ajar bathroom door. "It’s all right. It’s a sad movie. I think you’re just having extreme reactions to everything. I’d even try to take credit for it," he murmured, "but Linc said pregnancy someti-"
She reappeared in the doorway and interrupted, tissue in hand, "Oh, yeah, it’s definitely the pregnancy, but I still feel like an idiot."
"You’re not," he said softly, restraining his twitching hand from reaching up to touch her face. "You’re not an idiot-you’re just pregnant. I understand."
She smiled, a shaky smile, but a smile nonetheless. "I appreciate you being so understanding, really I do, but maybe we should call it a night."
Michael nodded, feeling relieved. One could only expect a man in his condition to put up with so much temptation, and two and half hours seemed to be his limit.
As he walked down to the El station from her apartment a few minutes later, he convinced himself that each time he saw her, it would get better, easier. Eventually he’d be able to sit in her apartment and not imagine spreading her legs to go down on her. Eventually he’d just see her as the friend he was trying to make her become. Eventually he’d just feel about her the way she felt about him.
~*~
Sara’s dreams that night were terrible and disjointed, wonderful and short-lived. She awoke four times, each time breathing heavily from either the terror of Michael disappearing before her eyes ala Somewhere In Time style, or from the brink of orgasm, or from tears that started to fall before she even awoke completely to an insane happiness that even her subconscious realized was false.
When she finally got up at 6am, giving up the fight of sleeping at all, she felt more stupid than she had after she ran from the diner on the first night she and Michael had met up. She couldn’t imagine spending more time with him if every time was going to end in some sort of crazy emotional hurricane, yet the idea of not seeing him again was more painful than anything she’d ever felt before, even his abandonment in Panama.
That was the sad truth; she wanted him somehow, any way she could get him. If they were going to be friends, then she just had to find away to make it work, because she couldn’t continue to behave like this and think he’d put up with it. He was a man, after all. Emotional psychosis, even pregnancy related, was only tolerable for so long, and she knew if she was irritated by it, he couldn’t be far behind, though she was sure Michael had more patience than she ever dreamed of having.
So she went to work and worried about it for two more days before she finally called him. He sounded happy to hear from her, he asked if she’d recovered from the trauma of the film with a laugh and then invited her to his apartment, which he’d only moved into a month previously. "Linc would have been fine with me living with him forever, but I think Jane was really over it, so I’ve got a place near downtown. It’s right up from a Starbucks, so it’s a good location."
When she hung up the phone, she folded the piece of paper with the directions on it and slipped it into her purse. Then she sat down and cried again. Her mother had often said be careful what you wish for because you just might get it, and she finally understood that meaning. After Michael had left her in Panama, all she had wished for was to know that he was all right. So eight months later, a letter came. Then for two years, she wished that she could just see him again, and that maybe he would apologize, and that maybe she could know he was happy. Then she wished he would believe her when she said she wanted to be friends, and that he would buy that she’d cried a river over a 30 year old movie because she was pregnant, not because watching a love story about two people who only had one perfect night together and then were ripped apart by circumstances beyond their control reminded her all too well that she sat on a sofa with a man she loved desperately. She now realized she always would, even though she had tried to stop, to move on, to have a child that had no father, but she’d told herself, didn’t need one anyway. And he wanted nothing from her except a simple, expectation-free friendship. He wanted it so much he was willing to put up with her craziness, because his only alternative was Lincoln, Jane and their two kids.
When she arrived at his apartment, the idea that she was his only friend quickly evaporated, because Lincoln’s oldest son, LJ, was there. She hadn’t seen him since Panama, and so they had happy but slightly awkward reunion as LJ was just on his way out the door.
"He just came up for the weekend," Michael explained once his nephew had left. "He’s going to University of Illinois down in Champaign. We’re going to go catch a movie tomorrow."
"He looks like he’s doing great," Sara commented, dropping her purse and kicking her shoes off next to Michael’s bright red sofa.
"Oh, he is. He met this girl, Laura, last year at some computer seminar, and they’re already talking marriage. I was just trying to tell him he’s got his whole life, and there’s no reason to rush it, but you know kids." Michael waved her to come over into the kitchen portion of the front room, where he was chopping vegetables.
"How old is he now?" Sara asked, carefully getting herself up onto a barstool.
"He just turned 20. I don’t even know why he’s thinking about marriage. When I was 20, it was the last thing on my mind."
"Can I help?" she asked, pointing towards the cutting board he was using to cut up broccoli.
"No," he said, "this is the last of it. I hope you like stir fry." He picked up the cutting board and dumped the vegetables into the Wok on the stove.
"Sounds great," Sara said enthusiastically, her mother’s voice drifting somewhere over her head. As Michael chattered on about LJ, his studies, his girlfriend, and the supreme idiocy of the young, Sara knew she couldn’t do this. She wanted to, with all her heart, she wanted to be able to do it, to be capable of it, but it wasn’t in her to love Michael Scofield as a friend. It wasn’t in her to sit across a counter top from him and not want to embrace him. She could feel the love softening her neck muscles even, and her head tipped slightly as she studied him while he stirred soy sauce into the pan, still talking, but she didn’t hear anything he said. His eyes darted back and forth between what he was cooking and her face, and the short-sleeved shirt he wore today was a dark gray that stole the green and blue shades from his eyes, leaving them a murky, overcast-sky color that made her think of long rainy days in bed. His fingers moved deftly between seasoning bottles and wooden spoons, but she remembered them gliding carefully over her skin, and she felt her entire body heat up with the memory.
Her breasts had become more sensitive with her pregnancy, but now they tightened against the soft material of her bra, growing warm and firm. A slight ache developed between her thighs, and though she knew that the biological preparations her body was making, while out of her control for the moment, would never lead to lovemaking, she let her eyes drift shut while she listened, not to Michael’s words, but to the cadence of his voice, to the dark velvet quality of his tone.
It was the almost falling off the stool, and then jerking her eyes open to see that he had her in his arms and was moving her towards the sofa that brought her back to reality. "Michael?" she questioned, a little disoriented.
"I’ve got you," he murmured, his lips against her temple. And he did, one arm was under her thighs while the other cradled her shoulders against his chest. "You must have had a long day at work, huh? I should have come to your house to cook you dinner." He laid her out on the couch and then tugged the afghan off the back to lay it over her. His hand brushed her hair back from her cheek. "Why don’t you take a little nap? Dinner won’t be ready for a few minutes, anyway."
As his hand skated over the top of the afghan, and subsequently her belly, she reached up and grabbed it. "What happened, Michael?"
He was starting to straighten up from his crouched position by the sofa. "When?" he asked in return.
"What happened in Sona?"
She heard him sigh as well as felt the puff of air against her forehead. "Sara..." he shook his head, and her fear that he would never tell her seized her in an iron grasp. She had avoided even thinking about it, but it was the one thing she didn’t know that she needed to know. She needed to know what was so terrible that she hadn’t been enough, that her undiluted love couldn’t soften the horror of it for him.
She gripped his hand tightly, and scooted to sit up on the sofa. "Please," she begged, tears starting afresh of their own volition. "Please tell me."
Michael held up his free hand and said lowly, "Let me turn the stove off." When he came back a moment later, he had a box of Kleenex, which he set on her lap. Then he sat down next to her, but not right next to her. "Remember when I said I spent six months in Australia?" he asked.
Sara nodded, but wondered if this was just another way to avoid telling her.
"I saw a therapist while I was there, a good one. It helped a lot. Helped me come to terms with the way things were there. I lived in a society, and by the rules of that society, that was completely different than anything I’d ever known. In some ways, Fox River helped prepare me, but it couldn’t entirely, nothing could." He reached for one of Sara’s hands. "I don’t need to relive what happened there, and I won’t, not now, not when I’m finally able to put it behind me. All you need to know is I killed people in there; it was kill or be killed, and I killed. I did what I had to do to survive."
Stupified silence hovered over Sara briefly; she couldn’t believe that was what the problem was. Then she spluttered angrily, "I killed someone, Michael, remember? I was the reason you were even in there! But I didn’t push you away because of it!"
He sighed heavily. "I know. I know. But...my brain doesn’t work like everyone else’s, it’s hard to explain..."
"I know about the LLI," she said vehemently, all gentleness gone from her heart for the moment, so much so, she hardly took in his look of shock at this revelation. "I talked to the shrink you saw before you came to Fox River. But what about me, Michael? What about me! You went into that place because of me, and then you left me, because of me! I don’t care how your brain works! If you loved me, at all, like you said you did, you wouldn’t have done what you did to me!"
Jerking her hand from his, she shook the afghan off of herself and got agitatedly to her feet. He wasn’t looking at her anyway, instead he stared at a point on the floor between his shoes. "Why wasn’t I enough?" she cried.
His head came up then, and the tortured quality of his eyes dented the hardness that had suddenly enveloped her heart. "Sara..."
"Do you see this?" she asked waving her arm back and forth between them. "Do you see the irony of this? We’re here now, and you’ll be my friend, even though I’m apparently crazy, but you couldn’t just tell me what was wrong then? Why, Michael? Why? Why couldn’t you just let me be with you, even if I just had to follow you from Brazil to Europe to fucking Australia? I would have, you know. I would have gone anywhere, and waited however long I had to, just so I knew you were okay."
He stood up abruptly. "I wasn’t okay, Sara! I wasn’t okay for a long time. You being there wouldn’t have changed anything, except you would have grown to hate me for not being able to tell you, for not being able to explain it."
"You think I don’t hate you now? Now that you’re back, and you’re fine, and you’re my friend, and I’m going to have a baby, and you’ll be the uncle? You think I don’t hate you for that?" She gulped air as the voracious words tumbled from her lips.
His eyes narrowed and he flinched back, because obviously that hadn’t occurred to him. "What are you doing here, then? If you hate me so much, if you can’t stand this arrangement that we’ve had for all of a week, what the hell are you doing here?"
The baby kicked right then, hard, and Sara clutched at her belly because of it. "I really am crazy," she murmured, turning away from him. "That’s the only logical explanation."
"Are you all right?" he asked, hovering over her suddenly, his arm outstretched towards her abdomen.
She slapped his hand away. "I’m fine!" she snapped. "I’m just dandy. I can’t do this," she exclaimed, the words all but forcibly jumping from her mouth. "I can’t be here like this with you, I just can’t."
She marched barefooted and purse-less towards his front door, because she really wasn’t thinking clearly at the moment, but he followed close behind her, grabbing at her arm even as she swatted at him again. "Sara, you can’t just leave-"
"Watch me!" she yelled, but then he got a good grip on her arm and spun her so her back was to the door.
Pinning her there, his hands against her shoulders, he said in a voice much too calm for Sara’s spinning emotions. "Let me at least take you-"
She lifted her arms, attempting to shove him back and said, "Oh, nooooo, I don’t think so, this isn’t a date gone badly, this is a fight between friends, right? Just let me slam out of here, and I’m sure in a couple days we can act like it never happened at all!"
"I’d really appreciate it if you’d stop saying the word ‘friend’ like it’s ‘shit’," he growled, pushing his hands against her shoulders roughly. "You may not have meant it, but I did. I wanted us to be friends, but if it’s not possible, I understand."
She still had her closed fists pressed to his chest and she smacked him hard before saying, "Quit being so fucking understanding, Michael. Quit acting like you want me here, when if you’d ever really wanted me, you’d have fought for me!"
His expression defied definition, he looked beyond incredulous, beyond pissed. Where the calm had rested only moments before, he now looked like someone Sara had never seen before. "Are you kidding me?" he asked, moving closer, plucking her hands from his chest like they were the hands of a small child. He spun her around so that her belly wasn’t between them, and then he shoved his hips against her ass. She gasped as she felt the heat and hardness of his erection pressed between her buttocks, and when he thrust against her, she couldn’t fight the moan of longing that gurgled in her throat. "You need to be convinced? I’ve ached for you for three years, Sara. You want the truth? It’s only gotten worse since I saw you on the El, and then I had to get brave enough to talk to you, but now the ache in my gut seems livable compared to the ache in my chest."
Sara’s hands were braced on the door, but she no longer had any desire to walk through it. Her tears had receded with her anger, but now they blinded her as she felt consumed by the emotions Michael Scofield evoked in her. Loving him and hating him were so interconnected now, she wasn’t sure which she felt more, but in that moment with his body pressed tightly to hers, all she wanted to focus on was the need. She needed him, even if she hated him, even if she loved him. She needed him, in the barest sense of the word. And now that she knew he needed her too, she couldn’t imagine walking out the door. "Michael..." she gasped at the same moment his hands moved from where they gripped her arms. His fingers snaked under the hem of her long shirt and caressed up the slope of her belly until her breasts were in his palms, bare and beaded to his touch, her bra magically disintegrating under his hands.
"Please," he breathed against her earlobe, and she almost laughed. Did he really think she had the strength to say no?
Arching in his grasp, she ground her ass back into him and said the only word either of them wanted to hear. "Yes."
Chapter Two
http://domfangirlfic.livejournal.com/17141.html