Prison Break: A Walk-On Part in the War 2/20
TITLE: A Walk-On Part in the War
RATING: NC-17 eventually, most parts R.
PAIRINGS: Michael/Alex, Michael/Sara, Lincoln/Jane
SPOILERS: It goes AU immediately after ‘Rendezvous’, but select elements from the rest of the season wound up finding their way into the work, great, sprawling thing that it grew into.
SUMMARY: A conscience is a hard thing to get rid of.
Part Two
Lincoln did not like the way that LJ was watching his grandfather at all: awed, nearly adoring, as if he was looking at a great American hero that the history books had not had a chance to catch up with. It was all that Lincoln could do not to grab his son by the shoulder and physically drag him as far away from his grandfather as he was capable of, into another room if they were not going to be allowed out of the house without completely breaking down the door and probably some heads.
Though he did was remaining calm for now, Lincoln did not intend to forget the similarities between this place that he was not allowed to leave and the last place that he had not been allowed to leave. From where he was standing, the furniture was more opulent here, but the spirit was the same.
Aldo paced close to LJ as he struggled to process the fact that the son that he had abandoned and who had been wrongly convicted and nearly executed as a result of his decisions three decades before, that his son might now have other ideas on his mind than what his father wanted of him. Lincoln was sure that it was a shocking revelation. In the meantime, it was all that he could do not to put his hand onto LJ’s shoulder and draw him closer, maybe even push him behind him so that Lincoln would be able to shield him with his own body if the need should arise. He knew how to deal with LJ as a small child, and he knew how to deal with LJ as a man. When neither approach could quite be applied, he found himself unsure of he should do and which step he should take next.
Jane was watching him with those cool, dispassionate eyes that she had, making Lincoln wonder if his hand had not given some kind of betraying twitch that he had not been aware of. Under her frank, appraising stare, Lincoln had reason to wonder if there had ever been room for human emotion in those eyes, which were the same color as the crisp, tailored suit that she was wearing, or if she had always maintained that air of detached efficiency. Maybe she had at one time, and her involvement in the Company had sucked it all out of her. If this was a thought that was supposed to make Lincoln feel more kindly towards her, then it was failing. He could feel his eyes narrowing slightly before he turned away and back towards his father and son. Even though Aldo had vouched for the trustworthiness of everyone who knew the location of the safe house, Lincoln did not feel comfortable with any of them out of his sight.
“Does Michael have a cellular phone?” Aldo asked as he finally stopped pacing long enough to meet Lincoln’s eyes again. It made all of the old, protective urges rise up in Lincoln all over again to hear Aldo call Michael by his familiar name. He did not know what he would have done if Aldo had actually referred to Michael as his son. Lincoln glanced over towards the son that he was struggling hard to keep from being too impressed with his grandfather and wondered if LJ would be trying to do the same with his own son in thirty years.
Lincoln shook his head. “No,” he answered gruffly. “We’ve been using disposable phones. Safer. I don’t know the number to his latest one.”
Aldo paused and muttered a curse beneath his breath before he continued. “Yeah,” he conceded without looking happy about it. He rubbed his hand over his face and then his hair, a gesture that was shockingly similar to one that Lincoln had seen Michael perform a thousand times before. Lincoln blinked. “You’re right.” He blinked again. “Jane?”
Jane had an eerie way of watching everything around her at once. Even though she turned her head in Aldo’s direction and inquired, “Yes?” in a level tone, Lincoln still felt that she was watching him from the corner of her eye. The tip of her tongue darted out to touch at the split in her lip for a moment before disappearing again. Lincoln could not be sure, but he thought that her tongue might still be red with fresh blood. He had struck her pretty hard, even though it had been some hours before. Lincoln could still not bring himself to be sorry for it.
“Go get the van ready,” Aldo told her in a brusque voice that still sounded as if he was more distracted than intentionally unkind. He shared that trait with Michael, too. It was alarming how much Lincoln’s younger brother was turning out to be his father’s son, considering that the two of them had never actually met, Aldo’s words notwithstanding.
Jane nodded and left the room without speaking. Lincoln noticed that LJ was watching Jane’s ass, which was admittedly not unappealing, as she exited. “Hey,” he warned him in a reproving tone.
LJ jumped as if he had been caught doing something that he knew he shouldn’t. He lifted his shoulders into a slight shrug and ducked his head to hide a grin before he muttered, “She’s nice.”
“She’s something,” Lincoln answered. LJ sure didn’t seem to be holding the fact that he essentially been kidnapped by Jane against her. Lincoln tried to remember if he had ever been that forgiving when he was LJ’s age, if the package was pretty enough. He had a feeling that he had been that forgiving right up to the day of his arrest. To Aldo, he went on, “Look, we appreciate your help-“ The old man’s eyebrows went up. Okay, so Lincoln might have to give him a point there, but hell would freeze over before he admitted it. “But I think my boy and me are better traveling alone. The fewer people, the fewer there are to attract attention.”
Aldo shook his head. Even his stubborn expression was familiar. Michael took after their mother; seeing all of these expressions that reminded Lincoln so strongly of his brother crossing his father’s face was becoming unsettling. “Not when the two of you are on every wanted poster in the nation,” he answered. “They know that LJ is with you, and the media is all over it.” Lincoln thought that the disgust in Aldo’s voice meant that he was referring to the Company rather than to the legitimate cops, but there was no way of being sure. He could not help but feel a twinge when he thought of the officers that Jane and her people had run into a tree in order to extricate LJ and himself. Neither one of them had begun to move again by the time that Jane’s vehicle had pulled away. “You need people with you who aren’t being mentioned at the top of every news hour.”
“Fine,” Lincoln gritted, wishing that what Aldo was saying didn’t make such a damnable amount of sense. “But you stop at the border. Michael’s plan doesn’t include room for uninvited guests.”
“What if you didn’t have to run at all?” Aldo asked him. His voice and demeanor were both so sincere that Lincoln could not help but scan the room for a trap. Jane had still not returned. “Terrence Steadman is still alive.”
“Know that,” Lincoln grunted. He continued to scan the room as that prickle of unease worked further into his back. “Seeing as I didn’t kill him.”
“Do you know how to prove to anyone else that he’s still alive?” Aldo countered, for the first time sounding annoyed rather than merely resigned to Lincoln’s continuing hostility. Lincoln felt his hackles rise even higher. Felt the anger building up in him, and it felt good. His gaze slid sideways to take in LJ, who for the first time was losing his awed look and seemed to realize that there was something far more wrong in this room than a few frayed tempers rubbing against one another. It was on the tip of Lincoln’s tongue to tell LJ to leave the room for a few minutes. It had been pretty bad between Lisa and himself at the end, and LJ had been so small that he probably would not have remembered in any case, but they had always taken great pains not to conduct their fights where he could hear them. That same protective urge remained even now, in spite of the fact that LJ was only a few years shy of being a man himself and was not stupid in any case: he knew very well that his father and his grandfather were not fond of one another.
Maybe the protective urge would never leave, Lincoln admitted to himself ruefully, as he realized that an equal portion of his reasons for not ordering LJ out of the room had to do with not wanting to let the boy out of his sight for a second.
“Until you do,” Aldo continued. If he had noticed the significant pause while Lincoln watched LJ, he made no mention of it. “You will always be running. And they will always be chasing you.”
‘Better being chased than pacing in a cage,’ Lincoln thought but did not say. He could feel his eyes narrowing by a tick, while the house continued to feel too big, too quiet, and too altogether much like an Ad Seg wing that someone had put some energy into decorating.
Lincoln had a pretty good idea that the man that he was now resembled the kid that he had been when Aldo left so little that they were connected by name only, but something on his face must have still been recognizable. Aldo said softly, “That might be fine for you and Michael, your adults and can make these choices, but what about LJ? He’s still a boy. He needs you to decide what’s best for him.”
The previous forty-eight hours of running had done such to LJ that he did not even bother to bristle in the typically teenaged way at being dismissed as too young to look after himself. Had Lincoln ordered him out of the room at that point, he thought that the boy would have gone willingly. Lincoln could feel anger rising up and off of his skin like a storm cloud. “You got a lot of nerve,” he said in a voice that barely rose above a whisper. It did not need to. “You got a hell of a lot of nerve, talking to me about family after you ran out on your own.”
“I know,” Aldo said, having the grace to look ashamed of himself for a second or two. Lincoln had no way of knowing if it was sincere or not. He was not going to lay any money on it.
“It took your guys less than an hour to get to LJ and me after we were caught,” Lincoln continued, and found that his anger only grew stronger, rather than abating, as he went on. He took a deep breath through his nose and ordered himself to remain calm-relatively-rather than smashing up the furniture. “You been tailing us that close this entire time, and it never bothered you to just leave us twisting in the wind?” While LJ was on the very of being sent for a crime that he had not committed to a prison that was if anything even meaner than Fox River, while Veronica had been killed, while he and Michael had come close to being killed themselves, God, how many times? Lincoln thought of how thoroughly Michael had panicked when he had found out that Sara had been caught up in the wake of his plan, so that Lincoln had for several hours thought that at any moment Michael was going to throw his entire plan up and into the air so that he could dash back to Chicago and pull her out of the fire with his bare hands.
“You were safer alone then,” Aldo said. His face did not betray any hint that he understood just how weak and bullshit his excuse was. Superficial similarities aside, Lincoln decided, Michael was much more like their mother. It was to his credit. “Now you’re not.”
That was…not even remotely an answer. Lincoln felt a line appearing between his eyes, but before he could point that out, Aldo said abruptly, “Jane should have been back by now.” His tone had gone sharp, his face tight and focused, and the resemblance to Michael was starting to become clear again.
Lincoln twisted to look back in the direction that she had gone. He did not know how long it should take to prepare this van that Aldo was so concerned about, as they were traveling across a modern landscape from Colorado to New Mexico, not on camel-back across the ancient Sahara and with two people who could at the very least show their faces in public without having guns pointed at them. It was still taking too long, his father was right. The house seemed even larger and more intimidatingly quiet than it had before.
“LJ, come here,” Lincoln said sharply, not caring that they were separated by only a few feet and Lincoln had no idea how he was going to protect LJ when he had no weapons save for his own body. Wide-eyed and suddenly nervous as he heard in his father’s voice that now would be in the last time in the world to behave like an ordinary teenager and argue, LJ obeyed. He glanced around himself as if he, too, was beginning to pick up on the way that the house had begun to pulse with a deep and malicious life of its won before he stepped forward.
“He’s safer away from you,” Aldo said. He was not making any great effort to make his tone soft or apologetic; to hear him speak, he could care less if Lincoln heeded his words or went in the other direction and attached one of those kiddie leashes that soccer moms used in malls to LJ’s belt loop. Lincoln ground his teeth together until he was almost surprised when he did not taste enamel. Slowly and with a terrible reluctance, he realized that his father was right.
“Through the kitchen,” Aldo told LJ in a curt tone which said clearly that he was not a man accustomed to being disobeyed and showing for the first time how much it was costing him to indulge Lincoln even that much. “There’s a door to the outside in there. Go to the trees and wait for us there. If no one comes for you in fifteen minutes, run.”
“He’s going to be picked off if he goes out into the open,” Lincoln interjected, not willing to let his father take the small leeway that he had been granted too far. One father might be willing to throw his son onto a pyre so that he could go and fight his enemies alone. The other was not.
Aldo fixed him with a look that made him feel clumsy and stupid for even needing to ask, which only made Lincoln angrier. The apologetic rescuer was long gone and had left only the man who had been able to devote himself to decades of secrecy and murder. “They’ll be aiming for you, not him.”
Lincoln blew a long stream of air through his nose and decided, hell, none of the furniture in here was that damned nice. He jerked his head slightly to indicate that LJ should do as Aldo asked before he could vent his temper on the innocent wood, not sure that he could speak and still stay in control of himself. LJ disappeared down the hallway without making a sound. Lincoln listened for any whisper of LJ’s sneakers across the tile and did not relax until he realized that he could hear none. If he could not hear, then neither could the people who would want to gun LJ down. Lincoln turned back and snarled at Aldo, “Don’t do that again.”
Aldo was unruffled. Lincoln imagined that he had faced many more and more threatening sights while he had been in the employ of the Company. It was not a thought that was calming him down. “I was telling the truth,” Aldo said. Lincoln had no doubt. When talking about his former employers seemed to be the only time that Aldo could even get close to it. “They’ll want to kill you and me first.”
Maybe. Lincoln had been too generous in even granting him that much credit, he realized. “Old man,” he growled, lunging forward and grabbing Aldo by the front of his shirt. He did not realize until then that he had denied his father the courtesy of his name. “You told me that he would be safe.”
Aldo grabbed for Lincoln’s wrist and twisted himself free. “I said that they would be aiming for us,” he said. “We know the most. LJ will wait.”
Unless whoever it was that the Company had sent-if they had sent someone, and he and Aldo both were not overreacting to laziness on Jane’s part and the house’s eerie and nearly personal way of distorting sound-decided that the surest way to punish Lincoln was to harm someone that he cared about. They had a funny way of doing that. Lincoln released his father, took a step back, and made a small sound from the back of his throat as he realized that he was the only one in the room who had made this leap. “Let’s go.” It wasn’t his house and not his mission to be giving orders. Lincoln could not seem to give a damn.
Aldo’s mouth twisted for a moment, the only sign of disapproval that broke his outward Zen. He produced a gun from nowhere and glided off through the house with a grace and silence that belied his increased age. Lincoln had no choice but to follow in the hopes of finding the enemy and dealing with them unless he wanted to stay behind and worry that he would at any moment hear a gunshot that would signify that LJ had been worth shooting, after all. Lincoln was not quite so silent as his father, having not received the training in the art of being a ghost that he imagined Aldo had. He had still been on the more dangerous side of division between law and chaos for a very long time before he had been put on death row. He knew how to transform all of his bulk into an advantage and still move with a speed and grace that belonged to a much smaller man. Lincoln’s feet made only the very barest of thudding sounds as they came down upon the tile. He still wondered if that might not be too loud.
The entire house stayed silent, an imposing, ringing silence that seemed alive in its own right, that made Lincoln wonder if he and Aldo both had not been hunted for so long that they had not started to create enemies that were not there. The very softest of noises, nearly a sigh, from the entryway as he and Aldo were drawing near to it convinced him that it wasn’t that simple. He froze with one foot poised to take a step and watched as his father, drawn ahead of him and already past the entryway, paused and turned. Lincoln turned into the shadowy hall with a speed and recklessness that surprised even him, forgetting that for the moment that he carried no weapon.
Jane was on her back on the exquisite floor, Aldo’s man whose name Lincoln had never bothered to learn kneeling over her as her long cornsilk hair spread around her head in a fan. Her face was turning nearly as red as the blood that was trickling down from the lip that Lincoln had split earlier. Someone had punched her again to make it start bleeding once more. Lincoln, catching the details of the scene quickly but in a disjointed and out of order way, saw finally that the man who was kneeling over Jane in an eerie parody of an embrace also had his hands wrapped around her throat and was squeezing until his knuckles turned white. There was a red mark blossoming on his wrist that would darken into a bruise later, if Aldo’s man lived long enough. At the moment, Lincoln was far from willing to guarantee that. A gun lay on the tile several feet away. Jane must have knocked it out of his hand before he could shoot her; she was lucky that she wasn’t dead.
Lincoln could hear Aldo yell the man’s name sharply and knew that he was probably lifting his gun to fire, but he wasn’t thinking about his own well-being. Riding on a sudden and blinding rage, he lunged forward without thinking, taking the man around his midsection and driving them both to the ground. Jane was still kicking and fighting while she was being choked, her heels scuffling against the floor. She kicked Lincoln in the ribs by accident as he went past her. Lincoln could hear her beginning to gasp and wheeze behind him, but everything outside of the grunting and cursing of the man beneath him had descended into a low, buzzing hum.
Lincoln drew his fist back and put it into the man’s face once, twice, three times, until he felt the slickness of blood spreading across his knuckles. The hand that had been gripping at his forearm fell away. Someone was yelling his name. Lincoln took a deep breath, heard the voice become marginally louder, and felt all of his weight and size become an enemy again as he settled back into himself. He slammed his fist into the man’s face one more time without caring that the man was barely conscious and then rocked back onto his heels so that he could look around. Jane had pushed herself up onto one elbow so that she could touch at her bruised throat with her other hand. There were red marks in the ivory flesh that made the shapes of fingers and were already turning into bruises. Her eyes were still glassy and her breath was hitching in her throat every time that she tried to take it in too deeply. Lincoln wondered if she had not also taken a kick or two to the ribs as she was being subdued.
“Lincoln,” Aldo said again. Lincoln realized for the first time that his father was the one who had been calling his name all the while. Even if she had been so inclined, Jane did not have enough of her breath back to be capable of it. He still had the gun out, though it was pointed firmly at the unconscious man beneath Lincoln.
“Yeah,” Lincoln muttered, and stood. He examined his knuckles for a moment before he made a quick flicking motion to throw off the worst of the blood. It made a sound as it splattered against the door that echoed in silence that was only broken by his and Jane’s labored breathing.
“Are you all right?” Lincoln asked her.
Jane had pushed herself up and was now sitting with her back braced against the coat closet, though she still did not look if she was up to standing. The panicked red color was bleeding back out of her face, and she wore an expression which suggested that the spirit had a whole lot of ass-kicking to do once the body was up to it again. “Yes,” she said. Her hand touched at her throat again, and her voice sounded like a blues singer’s.
“Good,” Lincoln said shortly before he stepped over the inert body and put his hand against the front door. “I’m going to go find my kid.”
“There could be more,” Jane cautioned him, sounding surprised, or as surprised as Lincoln thought that she was capable of. Her eyes were as cool and reflective as ever. They were the sort of eyes that took in everything and returned nothing. Lincoln distrusted them immediately, though he had also known people with the very warmest of brown eyes who would have sold their own mother for spare parts.
“Don’t care,” Lincoln grunted as he threw the door open. The edge of it collided hard with the meaty part of the fallen man’s thigh. Lincoln really could not bring himself to care. Aldo was already closing in on his man, the gun out. He barely flicked his eyes up to meet Lincoln’s and acknowledge that his son was leaving at all. Whether it was approval to Lincoln for doing what Aldo had apparently never thought necessary or simple disinterest, Lincoln could not bring say. The list of things that he could not bring himself to care about was going to number in the hundreds by the end of the day.
In spite of his words to Jane, Lincoln paused as he stood on the porch and scanned for any movement that could be either his son or the enemy. “LJ,” he called softly. A muffled thump arose from inside the house, and Lincoln turned his head to give the door a disinterested look.
There was a rustling sound that made all of Lincoln’s hackles rise before LJ emerged from the woods at the end of the driveway. His hair was disheveled and his eyes were still a little wild. Lincoln almost expected to see leaves clinging to his collar. “Is everything okay?” LJ asked.
“No,” Lincoln answered, and then gestured for LJ to come with him. He kept his eye on all of the shadowy places and exposed corners where someone could be hiding. He could not help but feel as if he was stoked out here for anyone to take a shot at him if they chose, and he could not stop thinking of the way that Michael would become so frustrated whenever Lincoln would forget, even for a second, that he could not simply stroll down the street the same way that he would before this mess had started. Picturing a thousand different guns being pointed towards him at the moment and a thousand different fingers easing back upon the triggers, Lincoln thought that he might finally be taking that lesson to heart.
It was all that Lincoln could do not to put his arm around LJ’s shoulder and draw him close the way that he would have while LJ was small when LJ finally reached him. They went back into the house, Lincoln throwing a quick glance over his shoulder at the guard as he did so. LJ made a soft sound; Lincoln turned in time to see Jane put her heeled foot hard into the man’s ribs. Guess that answered the question of whether or not she had been given a kick or two herself. The look on her face was not something that Lincoln wanted LJ to see.
“This way, kid,” he said in a voice that came out gruff through worry that sound liked annoyance. He put his hand quickly onto LJ’s shoulder and took the both of them into the kitchen. They wouldn’t be able to hear anything but the very loudest of sounds from there. It occurred to Lincoln that he really ought to give a damn about those noises, but thinking about what could have happened to his kid, he couldn’t seem to make the emotional math come together.
LJ exhaled a shaky breath once they were standing in the kitchen, which was clean, neat, and very well-lit for a place that was owned and operated by former terrorists. “That was close,” he admitted.
“Yeah,” Lincoln said. He dragged his finger across the counter and thought that he would like the place so much better if it more resembled a lair. “Listen, kid, you know that this has to come to an end someday, right?”
LJ glanced up, his eyes hooded and cautious. “I know,” he said, and lifted one of his shoulders into a shrug. “They have to run out of bad guys eventually, right?”
Maybe not, and that was exactly what Lincoln was afraid of. In the thirty years since his father had left, they still had not run out. “I’m going to go check on your grandfather,” he told LJ. LJ nodded, and Lincoln left him standing in the kitchen as he went to find Jane and Aldo again. If he found them doing anything extreme, he told himself, he was going to step into the middle and put a halt to it, however much he was sure that he would not want to.
As it turned out, Lincoln never had to make that choice. A shot rang out. LJ yelled from behind him in the kitchen. The shot had come from the other direction. Lincoln still ground his teeth together, pictured LJ falling forward with a bullet in the back of his head or between his shoulder blades, and all but sprinted back into the entryway.
Aldo’s man was sprawled out across the tile floor with a bullet hole between his eyes. Lincoln had already made a decent ruin of his face with the four furious punches earlier, but the bullet hole still jumped out at him immediately. So did the flat way that the man’s eyes were staring up at the ceiling. They were already beginning to glaze.
Lincoln ran his thumb across his knuckles and felt the last of the blood there flake away. There was a gun resting only a few inches away from the dead man’s hand, and no way of knowing if it was there because he had dropped it when he fell or because it had been placed there to stage the scene. Lincoln glanced up at Jane and Aldo both without knowing what his expression must be.
Aldo was holding the smoking gun, literally. He engaged the safety before he shoved it back into the waistband of his pants. Aldo knelt beside the body and without waiting for a useless check of the pulse began briskly going through his pockets. Meanwhile, Jane was clutching at her wrist where a red mark identical to the one that she had bestowed upon Aldo’s man was turning dark and angry. She noticed Lincoln looking and first snorted, then spat viciously to the side. “Tit for tat,” she said. “He got the gun away from me.”
“So it was self-defense,” Lincoln said, making it something between a question and a statement.
Even when they were flashing with anger, those eyes were still cold. “I wouldn’t kill a helpless person,” she said. Realizing that she was not the one holding the gun, she then added, “And neither would Aldo.”
Unless the both of them were so torn up inside because they had been really crappy office assistants while working for the Company, Lincoln doubted that. He didn’t dignify the remark with an answer, turning instead to watch as his father rose to his feet. Aldo looked tired. He did not, however, look apologetic. “I worked with him for five years,” he said to no one in particular as he stared down at the body. “He killed three of my men.” Barely pausing to take a breath, Aldo went on, “We have to assume that everything here is corrupted. The Company could be arriving at any moment.”
“I’ll take another stab at the van,” Jane said automatically. She leaned down, scooped the gun from the floor, and chambered a bullet before she slid out the front door. Lincoln did not think that she was in the mood to fire a warning shot.
“There’s something else,” Aldo said as Lincoln made to follow Jane. Lincoln had had a feeling that there must be. He turned back with an arched eyebrow. “Does your brother know a woman named Sara Tancredi?”
Lincoln felt his entire body tense. “He does,” he allowed in a guarded tone. “Why?”
Aldo touched at the butt of his gun and looked troubled. “I’ll explain on the way,” he said.
End Part Two
RATING: NC-17 eventually, most parts R.
PAIRINGS: Michael/Alex, Michael/Sara, Lincoln/Jane
SPOILERS: It goes AU immediately after ‘Rendezvous’, but select elements from the rest of the season wound up finding their way into the work, great, sprawling thing that it grew into.
SUMMARY: A conscience is a hard thing to get rid of.
Part Two
Lincoln did not like the way that LJ was watching his grandfather at all: awed, nearly adoring, as if he was looking at a great American hero that the history books had not had a chance to catch up with. It was all that Lincoln could do not to grab his son by the shoulder and physically drag him as far away from his grandfather as he was capable of, into another room if they were not going to be allowed out of the house without completely breaking down the door and probably some heads.
Though he did was remaining calm for now, Lincoln did not intend to forget the similarities between this place that he was not allowed to leave and the last place that he had not been allowed to leave. From where he was standing, the furniture was more opulent here, but the spirit was the same.
Aldo paced close to LJ as he struggled to process the fact that the son that he had abandoned and who had been wrongly convicted and nearly executed as a result of his decisions three decades before, that his son might now have other ideas on his mind than what his father wanted of him. Lincoln was sure that it was a shocking revelation. In the meantime, it was all that he could do not to put his hand onto LJ’s shoulder and draw him closer, maybe even push him behind him so that Lincoln would be able to shield him with his own body if the need should arise. He knew how to deal with LJ as a small child, and he knew how to deal with LJ as a man. When neither approach could quite be applied, he found himself unsure of he should do and which step he should take next.
Jane was watching him with those cool, dispassionate eyes that she had, making Lincoln wonder if his hand had not given some kind of betraying twitch that he had not been aware of. Under her frank, appraising stare, Lincoln had reason to wonder if there had ever been room for human emotion in those eyes, which were the same color as the crisp, tailored suit that she was wearing, or if she had always maintained that air of detached efficiency. Maybe she had at one time, and her involvement in the Company had sucked it all out of her. If this was a thought that was supposed to make Lincoln feel more kindly towards her, then it was failing. He could feel his eyes narrowing slightly before he turned away and back towards his father and son. Even though Aldo had vouched for the trustworthiness of everyone who knew the location of the safe house, Lincoln did not feel comfortable with any of them out of his sight.
“Does Michael have a cellular phone?” Aldo asked as he finally stopped pacing long enough to meet Lincoln’s eyes again. It made all of the old, protective urges rise up in Lincoln all over again to hear Aldo call Michael by his familiar name. He did not know what he would have done if Aldo had actually referred to Michael as his son. Lincoln glanced over towards the son that he was struggling hard to keep from being too impressed with his grandfather and wondered if LJ would be trying to do the same with his own son in thirty years.
Lincoln shook his head. “No,” he answered gruffly. “We’ve been using disposable phones. Safer. I don’t know the number to his latest one.”
Aldo paused and muttered a curse beneath his breath before he continued. “Yeah,” he conceded without looking happy about it. He rubbed his hand over his face and then his hair, a gesture that was shockingly similar to one that Lincoln had seen Michael perform a thousand times before. Lincoln blinked. “You’re right.” He blinked again. “Jane?”
Jane had an eerie way of watching everything around her at once. Even though she turned her head in Aldo’s direction and inquired, “Yes?” in a level tone, Lincoln still felt that she was watching him from the corner of her eye. The tip of her tongue darted out to touch at the split in her lip for a moment before disappearing again. Lincoln could not be sure, but he thought that her tongue might still be red with fresh blood. He had struck her pretty hard, even though it had been some hours before. Lincoln could still not bring himself to be sorry for it.
“Go get the van ready,” Aldo told her in a brusque voice that still sounded as if he was more distracted than intentionally unkind. He shared that trait with Michael, too. It was alarming how much Lincoln’s younger brother was turning out to be his father’s son, considering that the two of them had never actually met, Aldo’s words notwithstanding.
Jane nodded and left the room without speaking. Lincoln noticed that LJ was watching Jane’s ass, which was admittedly not unappealing, as she exited. “Hey,” he warned him in a reproving tone.
LJ jumped as if he had been caught doing something that he knew he shouldn’t. He lifted his shoulders into a slight shrug and ducked his head to hide a grin before he muttered, “She’s nice.”
“She’s something,” Lincoln answered. LJ sure didn’t seem to be holding the fact that he essentially been kidnapped by Jane against her. Lincoln tried to remember if he had ever been that forgiving when he was LJ’s age, if the package was pretty enough. He had a feeling that he had been that forgiving right up to the day of his arrest. To Aldo, he went on, “Look, we appreciate your help-“ The old man’s eyebrows went up. Okay, so Lincoln might have to give him a point there, but hell would freeze over before he admitted it. “But I think my boy and me are better traveling alone. The fewer people, the fewer there are to attract attention.”
Aldo shook his head. Even his stubborn expression was familiar. Michael took after their mother; seeing all of these expressions that reminded Lincoln so strongly of his brother crossing his father’s face was becoming unsettling. “Not when the two of you are on every wanted poster in the nation,” he answered. “They know that LJ is with you, and the media is all over it.” Lincoln thought that the disgust in Aldo’s voice meant that he was referring to the Company rather than to the legitimate cops, but there was no way of being sure. He could not help but feel a twinge when he thought of the officers that Jane and her people had run into a tree in order to extricate LJ and himself. Neither one of them had begun to move again by the time that Jane’s vehicle had pulled away. “You need people with you who aren’t being mentioned at the top of every news hour.”
“Fine,” Lincoln gritted, wishing that what Aldo was saying didn’t make such a damnable amount of sense. “But you stop at the border. Michael’s plan doesn’t include room for uninvited guests.”
“What if you didn’t have to run at all?” Aldo asked him. His voice and demeanor were both so sincere that Lincoln could not help but scan the room for a trap. Jane had still not returned. “Terrence Steadman is still alive.”
“Know that,” Lincoln grunted. He continued to scan the room as that prickle of unease worked further into his back. “Seeing as I didn’t kill him.”
“Do you know how to prove to anyone else that he’s still alive?” Aldo countered, for the first time sounding annoyed rather than merely resigned to Lincoln’s continuing hostility. Lincoln felt his hackles rise even higher. Felt the anger building up in him, and it felt good. His gaze slid sideways to take in LJ, who for the first time was losing his awed look and seemed to realize that there was something far more wrong in this room than a few frayed tempers rubbing against one another. It was on the tip of Lincoln’s tongue to tell LJ to leave the room for a few minutes. It had been pretty bad between Lisa and himself at the end, and LJ had been so small that he probably would not have remembered in any case, but they had always taken great pains not to conduct their fights where he could hear them. That same protective urge remained even now, in spite of the fact that LJ was only a few years shy of being a man himself and was not stupid in any case: he knew very well that his father and his grandfather were not fond of one another.
Maybe the protective urge would never leave, Lincoln admitted to himself ruefully, as he realized that an equal portion of his reasons for not ordering LJ out of the room had to do with not wanting to let the boy out of his sight for a second.
“Until you do,” Aldo continued. If he had noticed the significant pause while Lincoln watched LJ, he made no mention of it. “You will always be running. And they will always be chasing you.”
‘Better being chased than pacing in a cage,’ Lincoln thought but did not say. He could feel his eyes narrowing by a tick, while the house continued to feel too big, too quiet, and too altogether much like an Ad Seg wing that someone had put some energy into decorating.
Lincoln had a pretty good idea that the man that he was now resembled the kid that he had been when Aldo left so little that they were connected by name only, but something on his face must have still been recognizable. Aldo said softly, “That might be fine for you and Michael, your adults and can make these choices, but what about LJ? He’s still a boy. He needs you to decide what’s best for him.”
The previous forty-eight hours of running had done such to LJ that he did not even bother to bristle in the typically teenaged way at being dismissed as too young to look after himself. Had Lincoln ordered him out of the room at that point, he thought that the boy would have gone willingly. Lincoln could feel anger rising up and off of his skin like a storm cloud. “You got a lot of nerve,” he said in a voice that barely rose above a whisper. It did not need to. “You got a hell of a lot of nerve, talking to me about family after you ran out on your own.”
“I know,” Aldo said, having the grace to look ashamed of himself for a second or two. Lincoln had no way of knowing if it was sincere or not. He was not going to lay any money on it.
“It took your guys less than an hour to get to LJ and me after we were caught,” Lincoln continued, and found that his anger only grew stronger, rather than abating, as he went on. He took a deep breath through his nose and ordered himself to remain calm-relatively-rather than smashing up the furniture. “You been tailing us that close this entire time, and it never bothered you to just leave us twisting in the wind?” While LJ was on the very of being sent for a crime that he had not committed to a prison that was if anything even meaner than Fox River, while Veronica had been killed, while he and Michael had come close to being killed themselves, God, how many times? Lincoln thought of how thoroughly Michael had panicked when he had found out that Sara had been caught up in the wake of his plan, so that Lincoln had for several hours thought that at any moment Michael was going to throw his entire plan up and into the air so that he could dash back to Chicago and pull her out of the fire with his bare hands.
“You were safer alone then,” Aldo said. His face did not betray any hint that he understood just how weak and bullshit his excuse was. Superficial similarities aside, Lincoln decided, Michael was much more like their mother. It was to his credit. “Now you’re not.”
That was…not even remotely an answer. Lincoln felt a line appearing between his eyes, but before he could point that out, Aldo said abruptly, “Jane should have been back by now.” His tone had gone sharp, his face tight and focused, and the resemblance to Michael was starting to become clear again.
Lincoln twisted to look back in the direction that she had gone. He did not know how long it should take to prepare this van that Aldo was so concerned about, as they were traveling across a modern landscape from Colorado to New Mexico, not on camel-back across the ancient Sahara and with two people who could at the very least show their faces in public without having guns pointed at them. It was still taking too long, his father was right. The house seemed even larger and more intimidatingly quiet than it had before.
“LJ, come here,” Lincoln said sharply, not caring that they were separated by only a few feet and Lincoln had no idea how he was going to protect LJ when he had no weapons save for his own body. Wide-eyed and suddenly nervous as he heard in his father’s voice that now would be in the last time in the world to behave like an ordinary teenager and argue, LJ obeyed. He glanced around himself as if he, too, was beginning to pick up on the way that the house had begun to pulse with a deep and malicious life of its won before he stepped forward.
“He’s safer away from you,” Aldo said. He was not making any great effort to make his tone soft or apologetic; to hear him speak, he could care less if Lincoln heeded his words or went in the other direction and attached one of those kiddie leashes that soccer moms used in malls to LJ’s belt loop. Lincoln ground his teeth together until he was almost surprised when he did not taste enamel. Slowly and with a terrible reluctance, he realized that his father was right.
“Through the kitchen,” Aldo told LJ in a curt tone which said clearly that he was not a man accustomed to being disobeyed and showing for the first time how much it was costing him to indulge Lincoln even that much. “There’s a door to the outside in there. Go to the trees and wait for us there. If no one comes for you in fifteen minutes, run.”
“He’s going to be picked off if he goes out into the open,” Lincoln interjected, not willing to let his father take the small leeway that he had been granted too far. One father might be willing to throw his son onto a pyre so that he could go and fight his enemies alone. The other was not.
Aldo fixed him with a look that made him feel clumsy and stupid for even needing to ask, which only made Lincoln angrier. The apologetic rescuer was long gone and had left only the man who had been able to devote himself to decades of secrecy and murder. “They’ll be aiming for you, not him.”
Lincoln blew a long stream of air through his nose and decided, hell, none of the furniture in here was that damned nice. He jerked his head slightly to indicate that LJ should do as Aldo asked before he could vent his temper on the innocent wood, not sure that he could speak and still stay in control of himself. LJ disappeared down the hallway without making a sound. Lincoln listened for any whisper of LJ’s sneakers across the tile and did not relax until he realized that he could hear none. If he could not hear, then neither could the people who would want to gun LJ down. Lincoln turned back and snarled at Aldo, “Don’t do that again.”
Aldo was unruffled. Lincoln imagined that he had faced many more and more threatening sights while he had been in the employ of the Company. It was not a thought that was calming him down. “I was telling the truth,” Aldo said. Lincoln had no doubt. When talking about his former employers seemed to be the only time that Aldo could even get close to it. “They’ll want to kill you and me first.”
Maybe. Lincoln had been too generous in even granting him that much credit, he realized. “Old man,” he growled, lunging forward and grabbing Aldo by the front of his shirt. He did not realize until then that he had denied his father the courtesy of his name. “You told me that he would be safe.”
Aldo grabbed for Lincoln’s wrist and twisted himself free. “I said that they would be aiming for us,” he said. “We know the most. LJ will wait.”
Unless whoever it was that the Company had sent-if they had sent someone, and he and Aldo both were not overreacting to laziness on Jane’s part and the house’s eerie and nearly personal way of distorting sound-decided that the surest way to punish Lincoln was to harm someone that he cared about. They had a funny way of doing that. Lincoln released his father, took a step back, and made a small sound from the back of his throat as he realized that he was the only one in the room who had made this leap. “Let’s go.” It wasn’t his house and not his mission to be giving orders. Lincoln could not seem to give a damn.
Aldo’s mouth twisted for a moment, the only sign of disapproval that broke his outward Zen. He produced a gun from nowhere and glided off through the house with a grace and silence that belied his increased age. Lincoln had no choice but to follow in the hopes of finding the enemy and dealing with them unless he wanted to stay behind and worry that he would at any moment hear a gunshot that would signify that LJ had been worth shooting, after all. Lincoln was not quite so silent as his father, having not received the training in the art of being a ghost that he imagined Aldo had. He had still been on the more dangerous side of division between law and chaos for a very long time before he had been put on death row. He knew how to transform all of his bulk into an advantage and still move with a speed and grace that belonged to a much smaller man. Lincoln’s feet made only the very barest of thudding sounds as they came down upon the tile. He still wondered if that might not be too loud.
The entire house stayed silent, an imposing, ringing silence that seemed alive in its own right, that made Lincoln wonder if he and Aldo both had not been hunted for so long that they had not started to create enemies that were not there. The very softest of noises, nearly a sigh, from the entryway as he and Aldo were drawing near to it convinced him that it wasn’t that simple. He froze with one foot poised to take a step and watched as his father, drawn ahead of him and already past the entryway, paused and turned. Lincoln turned into the shadowy hall with a speed and recklessness that surprised even him, forgetting that for the moment that he carried no weapon.
Jane was on her back on the exquisite floor, Aldo’s man whose name Lincoln had never bothered to learn kneeling over her as her long cornsilk hair spread around her head in a fan. Her face was turning nearly as red as the blood that was trickling down from the lip that Lincoln had split earlier. Someone had punched her again to make it start bleeding once more. Lincoln, catching the details of the scene quickly but in a disjointed and out of order way, saw finally that the man who was kneeling over Jane in an eerie parody of an embrace also had his hands wrapped around her throat and was squeezing until his knuckles turned white. There was a red mark blossoming on his wrist that would darken into a bruise later, if Aldo’s man lived long enough. At the moment, Lincoln was far from willing to guarantee that. A gun lay on the tile several feet away. Jane must have knocked it out of his hand before he could shoot her; she was lucky that she wasn’t dead.
Lincoln could hear Aldo yell the man’s name sharply and knew that he was probably lifting his gun to fire, but he wasn’t thinking about his own well-being. Riding on a sudden and blinding rage, he lunged forward without thinking, taking the man around his midsection and driving them both to the ground. Jane was still kicking and fighting while she was being choked, her heels scuffling against the floor. She kicked Lincoln in the ribs by accident as he went past her. Lincoln could hear her beginning to gasp and wheeze behind him, but everything outside of the grunting and cursing of the man beneath him had descended into a low, buzzing hum.
Lincoln drew his fist back and put it into the man’s face once, twice, three times, until he felt the slickness of blood spreading across his knuckles. The hand that had been gripping at his forearm fell away. Someone was yelling his name. Lincoln took a deep breath, heard the voice become marginally louder, and felt all of his weight and size become an enemy again as he settled back into himself. He slammed his fist into the man’s face one more time without caring that the man was barely conscious and then rocked back onto his heels so that he could look around. Jane had pushed herself up onto one elbow so that she could touch at her bruised throat with her other hand. There were red marks in the ivory flesh that made the shapes of fingers and were already turning into bruises. Her eyes were still glassy and her breath was hitching in her throat every time that she tried to take it in too deeply. Lincoln wondered if she had not also taken a kick or two to the ribs as she was being subdued.
“Lincoln,” Aldo said again. Lincoln realized for the first time that his father was the one who had been calling his name all the while. Even if she had been so inclined, Jane did not have enough of her breath back to be capable of it. He still had the gun out, though it was pointed firmly at the unconscious man beneath Lincoln.
“Yeah,” Lincoln muttered, and stood. He examined his knuckles for a moment before he made a quick flicking motion to throw off the worst of the blood. It made a sound as it splattered against the door that echoed in silence that was only broken by his and Jane’s labored breathing.
“Are you all right?” Lincoln asked her.
Jane had pushed herself up and was now sitting with her back braced against the coat closet, though she still did not look if she was up to standing. The panicked red color was bleeding back out of her face, and she wore an expression which suggested that the spirit had a whole lot of ass-kicking to do once the body was up to it again. “Yes,” she said. Her hand touched at her throat again, and her voice sounded like a blues singer’s.
“Good,” Lincoln said shortly before he stepped over the inert body and put his hand against the front door. “I’m going to go find my kid.”
“There could be more,” Jane cautioned him, sounding surprised, or as surprised as Lincoln thought that she was capable of. Her eyes were as cool and reflective as ever. They were the sort of eyes that took in everything and returned nothing. Lincoln distrusted them immediately, though he had also known people with the very warmest of brown eyes who would have sold their own mother for spare parts.
“Don’t care,” Lincoln grunted as he threw the door open. The edge of it collided hard with the meaty part of the fallen man’s thigh. Lincoln really could not bring himself to care. Aldo was already closing in on his man, the gun out. He barely flicked his eyes up to meet Lincoln’s and acknowledge that his son was leaving at all. Whether it was approval to Lincoln for doing what Aldo had apparently never thought necessary or simple disinterest, Lincoln could not bring say. The list of things that he could not bring himself to care about was going to number in the hundreds by the end of the day.
In spite of his words to Jane, Lincoln paused as he stood on the porch and scanned for any movement that could be either his son or the enemy. “LJ,” he called softly. A muffled thump arose from inside the house, and Lincoln turned his head to give the door a disinterested look.
There was a rustling sound that made all of Lincoln’s hackles rise before LJ emerged from the woods at the end of the driveway. His hair was disheveled and his eyes were still a little wild. Lincoln almost expected to see leaves clinging to his collar. “Is everything okay?” LJ asked.
“No,” Lincoln answered, and then gestured for LJ to come with him. He kept his eye on all of the shadowy places and exposed corners where someone could be hiding. He could not help but feel as if he was stoked out here for anyone to take a shot at him if they chose, and he could not stop thinking of the way that Michael would become so frustrated whenever Lincoln would forget, even for a second, that he could not simply stroll down the street the same way that he would before this mess had started. Picturing a thousand different guns being pointed towards him at the moment and a thousand different fingers easing back upon the triggers, Lincoln thought that he might finally be taking that lesson to heart.
It was all that Lincoln could do not to put his arm around LJ’s shoulder and draw him close the way that he would have while LJ was small when LJ finally reached him. They went back into the house, Lincoln throwing a quick glance over his shoulder at the guard as he did so. LJ made a soft sound; Lincoln turned in time to see Jane put her heeled foot hard into the man’s ribs. Guess that answered the question of whether or not she had been given a kick or two herself. The look on her face was not something that Lincoln wanted LJ to see.
“This way, kid,” he said in a voice that came out gruff through worry that sound liked annoyance. He put his hand quickly onto LJ’s shoulder and took the both of them into the kitchen. They wouldn’t be able to hear anything but the very loudest of sounds from there. It occurred to Lincoln that he really ought to give a damn about those noises, but thinking about what could have happened to his kid, he couldn’t seem to make the emotional math come together.
LJ exhaled a shaky breath once they were standing in the kitchen, which was clean, neat, and very well-lit for a place that was owned and operated by former terrorists. “That was close,” he admitted.
“Yeah,” Lincoln said. He dragged his finger across the counter and thought that he would like the place so much better if it more resembled a lair. “Listen, kid, you know that this has to come to an end someday, right?”
LJ glanced up, his eyes hooded and cautious. “I know,” he said, and lifted one of his shoulders into a shrug. “They have to run out of bad guys eventually, right?”
Maybe not, and that was exactly what Lincoln was afraid of. In the thirty years since his father had left, they still had not run out. “I’m going to go check on your grandfather,” he told LJ. LJ nodded, and Lincoln left him standing in the kitchen as he went to find Jane and Aldo again. If he found them doing anything extreme, he told himself, he was going to step into the middle and put a halt to it, however much he was sure that he would not want to.
As it turned out, Lincoln never had to make that choice. A shot rang out. LJ yelled from behind him in the kitchen. The shot had come from the other direction. Lincoln still ground his teeth together, pictured LJ falling forward with a bullet in the back of his head or between his shoulder blades, and all but sprinted back into the entryway.
Aldo’s man was sprawled out across the tile floor with a bullet hole between his eyes. Lincoln had already made a decent ruin of his face with the four furious punches earlier, but the bullet hole still jumped out at him immediately. So did the flat way that the man’s eyes were staring up at the ceiling. They were already beginning to glaze.
Lincoln ran his thumb across his knuckles and felt the last of the blood there flake away. There was a gun resting only a few inches away from the dead man’s hand, and no way of knowing if it was there because he had dropped it when he fell or because it had been placed there to stage the scene. Lincoln glanced up at Jane and Aldo both without knowing what his expression must be.
Aldo was holding the smoking gun, literally. He engaged the safety before he shoved it back into the waistband of his pants. Aldo knelt beside the body and without waiting for a useless check of the pulse began briskly going through his pockets. Meanwhile, Jane was clutching at her wrist where a red mark identical to the one that she had bestowed upon Aldo’s man was turning dark and angry. She noticed Lincoln looking and first snorted, then spat viciously to the side. “Tit for tat,” she said. “He got the gun away from me.”
“So it was self-defense,” Lincoln said, making it something between a question and a statement.
Even when they were flashing with anger, those eyes were still cold. “I wouldn’t kill a helpless person,” she said. Realizing that she was not the one holding the gun, she then added, “And neither would Aldo.”
Unless the both of them were so torn up inside because they had been really crappy office assistants while working for the Company, Lincoln doubted that. He didn’t dignify the remark with an answer, turning instead to watch as his father rose to his feet. Aldo looked tired. He did not, however, look apologetic. “I worked with him for five years,” he said to no one in particular as he stared down at the body. “He killed three of my men.” Barely pausing to take a breath, Aldo went on, “We have to assume that everything here is corrupted. The Company could be arriving at any moment.”
“I’ll take another stab at the van,” Jane said automatically. She leaned down, scooped the gun from the floor, and chambered a bullet before she slid out the front door. Lincoln did not think that she was in the mood to fire a warning shot.
“There’s something else,” Aldo said as Lincoln made to follow Jane. Lincoln had had a feeling that there must be. He turned back with an arched eyebrow. “Does your brother know a woman named Sara Tancredi?”
Lincoln felt his entire body tense. “He does,” he allowed in a guarded tone. “Why?”
Aldo touched at the butt of his gun and looked troubled. “I’ll explain on the way,” he said.
End Part Two