Prison Break fic: A Walk-On Part in the War 14/20
TITLE: A Walk-On Part in the War
RATING: This chapter is rated NC-17.
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 Fourteen
Sara didn’t sleep more than a few minutes at a time that night, and even those had to creep up on her without her consent. Eventually she moved from the ottoman to a an armchair on the other side of the room that still allowed her to keep Cameron in her line of sight when her eyes began to burn. The chair had an armrest on which Sara could brace her elbow and prop up her head, while still being uncomfortable enough to discourage sleep. Cameron himself showed little in the way of nightmares, even after the Ativan should have worn off. That was a good sign. He was going to have enough to deal with after he woke up.
Alex came into the room frequently to watch Cameron without speaking; he and Sara pretended not to notice each other. He would leave again shortly afterwards each time, as if something was keeping him from staying in one place for too long.
Sara rose for good shortly after the sun had begun to arc over the horizon. Rubbing at her eyes and suspecting that her last bout of sleepiness had lasted more than the handful of minutes that she was allotting to herself, she wandered into the kitchen where she and Michael had been flirting the night before. Sara thought that she must be the only one awake at this hour. She was wrong.
Monica was already awake and dressed, standing at the counter and fussing with the coffee maker. She was wearing a business suit and shoes with a short heel, her hair pulled back into an impeccable French twist. Monica looked like someone’s realtor; thinking of the way that Jane and Aldo dressed, Sara wondered what the full extent of Monica’s role within this operation actually was.
“Good morning,” Monica said when she noticed that Sara was standing there. She gestured towards the refrigerator behind her. “There’s food in there if you want it. I do a lot of things, but cooking is not one of them. I might have coffee in a minute, though.” Monica pulled a mysterious panel from the coffee maker and peered down at it before she replaced it where it had been and muttered, “Stupid thing.”
Sara tended not have much of an appetite in the morning, even when she was wasn’t nervous, and on the same day that she was going back into the lion’s den where she had nearly been killed there was none at all. She picked up an orange from a bowl on the counter and began to peel it as she watched Monica for a few moments more. At long last, Sara reached around Monica and pushed the same series of buttons that she had figured out the night before. The smell of fresh coffee began to fill the kitchen.
“Thanks,” Monica said, sounding surprised. She reached out and slapped at the side of the coffee maker, as if asking why it had needed to make that so difficult.
“Trial and error.” Sara leaned back against the counter and returned to her orange as she waited for the caffeine. She could not stop herself from watching Monica, marveling at how calm and composed the woman was when Sara was sure that she would be jitterbugging right out of her skin if she had to process the Company and the seemingly insurmountable power that it actually had on a daily basis. Fighting against it was like swimming against a strong current. Surely, before the tape had dropped into their laps, it must have been a good day just to tread water.
Sara also, thought she was inwardly horrified by the thought, wondered how many people Monica had killed. The man who had tried to murder Sara a few days before had looked as if he could have sat down and helped her with her taxes.
“I’ve never been in the field,” Monica said abruptly.
“Excuse me?” Sara took a bite of her orange and discovered that all of her normal rules about appetite went right out the window when she had eaten next to nothing the day before. She peeled off another section and popped it into her mouth before she even had time to finish chewing the first.
“I’ve never been in the field,” Monica repeated. She poured herself a cup of coffee, added sugar, and then reached around Sara and into the refrigerator for cream. “And I haven’t been in so much as a fist fight since the ninth grade. If you’re looking for a badass, then I suggest that you look somewhere else.”
“That’s not what I was thinking,” Sara lied. She could not stop herself from looking down at the kitchen tile as she spoke. If she was this bad of a liar when dealing with a perfect stranger, then it was a small wonder that her father had always been able to tell when she was using.
“I’m not offended,” Monica said, and looked as if she meant it. “Everyone thinks that when they first learn that this operation exists. They usually meet agents like Aldo or Jane first, so that they think that every safe house is going to be staffed with ninjas.” Monica shrugged before taking a sip of her coffee and finding that it was to her liking. She reached into the basket on the kitchen island, took out a muffin for herself, and began to eat it in small and ladylike bites. “Ben is very good with computers. I’m very good with keeping people organized and focused.” Monica shrugged and gave her a small and almost conspiratorial smile. “The secret to herding cats is not to let them realize that they’re being herded.”
That was rather a more chilling statement than Sara liked to hear from a woman that she had been beginning to like. She looked up from her orange in time to see Lincoln and Jane moving from the same hallway, down which Lincoln had disappeared the night before. Though the both of them were impeccably groomed, Sara still felt her eyebrows crawling up towards her hairline. So, she noticed, were Monica’s.
Jane and Lincoln parted ways from one another at the entrance to the kitchen. Jane left, presumably in search of Aldo, while Lincoln went to find LJ. Lincoln gave Sara a courteous and nearly old-fashioned nod before he did so. “Mornin’, doc. Monica.”
“Good morning,” Sara answered as Monica waggled her fingers. Sara could not help but look back upon what Monica had said to her a few moments before and wonder how many people had stayed in this safe house after first learning what the Company was and how far it extended, and how many of them were actually able to go back to their normal lives again afterwards. Monica reminded Sara of a girl that she had gone to college with, Ben of her neighbor across the hall back in Chicago.
Lincoln had barely turned away from the entryway before he was nearly running over Ben, who had crept up behind him without making a sound. So maybe he wasn’t exactly like the neighbor, who tended to announce his presence loudly wherever he went. Maybe lessons in getting from one place to another like a ninja were a part of the anti-Company orientation that one got after signing on the dotted line.
Ben stepped to the side so that Lincoln could pass. “Clearly, he’s a morning person,” he said after Lincoln had disappeared without saying a word.
“He’s not bad,” Sara responded automatically, though she realized a bare second later that she didn’t know Lincoln nearly well enough to say that for herself. He was good enough that Michael had been willing to move heaven and earth in order to break him out of prison, and Michael had yet to be wrong in his assessment of a person.
“Aldo’s a bear in the morning, too,” Ben said. He rolled his shoulders and rubbed his neck before he added, “Speaking of that, tell me that there’s coffee. It’s way too early for a war zone, and there are way too many people in this house who could actually make that happen.” Monica reached out and tapped at the coffee carafe with one manicured nail. Ben made an appreciative sound and began searching the cabinets for a mug, while Sara glanced out of the kitchen and into the house proper again.
Agent Mahone emerged from one of the seemingly endless successions of hallways while Michael arrived from another. While neither of them looked as if he had actually slept, it was a different and far less sated kind of sleeplessness than the sort that had marked Lincoln and Jane while they were ambling through. Sara felt relieved even as Michael blew straight through without seeming to realize that she was there at all. Her conflicted feelings did not ease when Agent Mahone’s first act was to stride over to the couch where his son was still sleeping.
‘Stop acting like you’re still in high school,’ Sara thought as she went over to stand beside him.
“The sedative wore off a few hours ago,” Sara said. Agent Mahone was staring down at Cameron, his features taut but unreadable. Sara thought that the fact that the rest of his body language was tense to the point of being rigged to explode told the rest of the story quite well.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Agent Mahone asked, raising his head so that he could look Sara in the eye. “That he’s still sleeping.”
‘I’m not a psychiatrist,’ was Sara’s first thought. It took her a moment more to realize that Agent Mahone was not asking her as a federal agent seeking her professional opinion, but as a grieving parent looking to be reassured. She tucked a few loose strands of hair behind her ears and resolved to do her best.
“Sleeping excessively can be a symptom of both depression and post traumatic stress disorder,” Sara answered honestly. Agent Mahone closed his eyes and stayed that way for several seconds before he opened them again. “But it hasn’t even been a full twelve hours since the…trauma, so it very well might be that he’s just tired. I think…I think that your wife might have shielded him from a lot of it.” Sara of course had no idea if that was true at all, but it was about as close to a lie as she was willing to get. Agent Mahone’s swift and sardonic glance said that he knew it, too, damn him. “He doesn’t seem to be having too many nightmares, though, and that’s a good thing even if it’s too early to tell anything else. You’re still probably going to want to find someone for him to talk to on a regular basis once this is all over.” Probably someone for herself, too, Sara added silently.
“Yeah.” Agent Mahone rubbed his hand across his face. Sara noticed that he was wearing a good two days’ worth of stubble. “Thank you. For looking out for him last night.” Agent Mahone’s tone expressed his disgust that he had not been able to do it himself, as if anyone who looked at him could not tell that he had been on the verge of dropping. Thinking that he was failing if he was not effortlessly holding up the entire world. Sara knew another man like that.
“You’re welcome,” Sara said simply, without adding that she herself had benefited from being able to go back to her old job for a few hours. She touched Agent Mahone lightly on the arm before she went back into the kitchen so that he could have a few minutes alone with his son.
Michael had returned to the kitchen, shaved and dressed even though he still looked very tired. His lips curved when he caught sight of her. “Good morning.”
“Good morning.” Sara watched the curve of Michael’s mouth and the way that a dimple was put into his cheek when he smiled. She needed to kiss that mouth, desperately, and didn’t care that it would make the bizarre and dysfunctional atmosphere of the kitchen even more awkward as a result.
Sara put her hand on the back of Michael’s neck, possessive even though a part of her was insisting that the point was to let Michael go even though the rest of her hadn’t caught up with that memo yet, and angled his mouth down to meet hers. Michael let out a surprised, pleased exhalation before he returned the attention, his hand settling against the small of her back for a moment before he remembered their audience and dropped it. Sara’s skin tingled where it had been.
“That was nice,” Michael whispered to her when they had stepped away from her. He sounded confused, and Sara was glad to welcome one more member to her club.
She swallowed and said, rather than the whole list of things that she was thinking, “You don’t owe me anything, Michael.” Because if he thought that he did, she knew, there would be no stopping him from paying that debt. The very idea horrified Sara, even though she was not sure that she liked the possibility of letting him go any more.
Michael’s eyes darkened. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
Jesus, he was a terrible liar. Sara had no idea how he had gotten his plan this far, when he was so bad at it. Unless she was the only one that he could not lie to. That thought did not make Sara feel any better.
She wanted to kiss him again, but only said instead, “I made my own choices. None of them were your fault. Make yours.” If what either one of them felt was love, or even only the beginnings of it, then all right. But she would not carry on anything that was based upon obligation. Sara caught herself a second later and added, in a lower tone that hardly sounded like herself, “And so you know? That doesn’t mean that I’m waving the white flag, either.”
A startled laugh came from Michael’s mouth before he leaned back and studied Sara’s face for several seconds. Sara never knew what he was looking at when he stared at her like that. Sometimes she thought that he might be seeing the same beauty there that he saw in his buildings. “I know.” Their hands found each other even though Sara was not sure that either one of them had given the order to move/
Lincoln and Agent Mahone appeared at one end of the kitchen, Aldo and Jane at the other. The second group of people looked considerably happier than the first. While Jane and Aldo were both focused and intense, as if going into the field required several hours of mental preparation and they wanted to be sure that they didn’t waste a moment when they could be getting ready to kill people, there were storm clouds painted dark and fierce across Lincoln’s eyes. Sara scanned him and Agent Mahone both from their heads down to their feet and did not realize until she was done that she had been looking for blood. When she discovered that neither of them had a bruise to show, she was not sure that she actually felt better.
LJ seemed to materialize from nowhere behind his father. As Lincoln was in a temper that was only barely being held in by the boundaries of his skin, he seemed even larger than he did when he was calm. It was easy to see how LJ could have lingered in the shadow of that without being seen. He didn’t waste any time in going to stand by Jane. She raised startled eyes to Lincoln as the boy approached.
“LJ’s going to be going with you and Sara to Chicago,” Lincoln gritted. The words were barely intelligible; he was hardly able to move his jaw. Lincoln cast Agent Mahone a glare in addition to these words, as if Agent Mahone rather than his own teenaged son was the one who was misbehaving. Agent Mahone’s quirked eyebrow spoke of a great many worse things that he had seen, and suggested that Lincoln try harder the next time if he truly wanted to make an impression.
Jane’s jaw dropped, and she turned towards Aldo in preparation for him to put a halt to any such idiocy. Aldo only looked towards the ceiling for a few seconds, perhaps thinking of how much older LJ was than Lincoln and Michael had been when he abandoned them, and said, “It’s not as if we’re not breaking every other protocol that we have. There are more civilians on this mission than there are actual field agents.”
Jane continued to stare at Aldo as if she was sure that he was playing an ill-timed joke on them all and that he was surely going to put a halt to at any second. When that moment did not come, Jane snapped her mouth shut and gave both Sara and LJ swift jerks of her head. “Come on. We have a lot of ground to cover.”
Michael squeezed at Sara’s hand before he let her go. “Be careful,” he told her.
“You yourself.” Sara followed Jane and LJ out of the house, to one of the sleek SUVs that both sides seemed to believe were the end-all and be-all when it came to automotive transportation. Her eyes pricked and stung as the sun came far enough over the horizon to strike her full in the face.
“There is an extra pair of sunglasses in the glove compartment if you require them,” Jane said as she watched Sara blink rapidly and turn her face away. Her tone walked a curious line between concerned and detached, as if she already knew exactly why Sara needed to turn her face away from them all until she had composed herself again, and was only holding back because she did not want to push to far into someone else’s emotional space.
Sara took a swipe at each of her eyes before she put her seatbelt on and turned towards Jane. “I’m fine,” she said, and meant it. Jane took her at her word and pulled away from the house.
End Part Fourteen
RATING: This chapter is rated NC-17.
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 Fourteen
Sara didn’t sleep more than a few minutes at a time that night, and even those had to creep up on her without her consent. Eventually she moved from the ottoman to a an armchair on the other side of the room that still allowed her to keep Cameron in her line of sight when her eyes began to burn. The chair had an armrest on which Sara could brace her elbow and prop up her head, while still being uncomfortable enough to discourage sleep. Cameron himself showed little in the way of nightmares, even after the Ativan should have worn off. That was a good sign. He was going to have enough to deal with after he woke up.
Alex came into the room frequently to watch Cameron without speaking; he and Sara pretended not to notice each other. He would leave again shortly afterwards each time, as if something was keeping him from staying in one place for too long.
Sara rose for good shortly after the sun had begun to arc over the horizon. Rubbing at her eyes and suspecting that her last bout of sleepiness had lasted more than the handful of minutes that she was allotting to herself, she wandered into the kitchen where she and Michael had been flirting the night before. Sara thought that she must be the only one awake at this hour. She was wrong.
Monica was already awake and dressed, standing at the counter and fussing with the coffee maker. She was wearing a business suit and shoes with a short heel, her hair pulled back into an impeccable French twist. Monica looked like someone’s realtor; thinking of the way that Jane and Aldo dressed, Sara wondered what the full extent of Monica’s role within this operation actually was.
“Good morning,” Monica said when she noticed that Sara was standing there. She gestured towards the refrigerator behind her. “There’s food in there if you want it. I do a lot of things, but cooking is not one of them. I might have coffee in a minute, though.” Monica pulled a mysterious panel from the coffee maker and peered down at it before she replaced it where it had been and muttered, “Stupid thing.”
Sara tended not have much of an appetite in the morning, even when she was wasn’t nervous, and on the same day that she was going back into the lion’s den where she had nearly been killed there was none at all. She picked up an orange from a bowl on the counter and began to peel it as she watched Monica for a few moments more. At long last, Sara reached around Monica and pushed the same series of buttons that she had figured out the night before. The smell of fresh coffee began to fill the kitchen.
“Thanks,” Monica said, sounding surprised. She reached out and slapped at the side of the coffee maker, as if asking why it had needed to make that so difficult.
“Trial and error.” Sara leaned back against the counter and returned to her orange as she waited for the caffeine. She could not stop herself from watching Monica, marveling at how calm and composed the woman was when Sara was sure that she would be jitterbugging right out of her skin if she had to process the Company and the seemingly insurmountable power that it actually had on a daily basis. Fighting against it was like swimming against a strong current. Surely, before the tape had dropped into their laps, it must have been a good day just to tread water.
Sara also, thought she was inwardly horrified by the thought, wondered how many people Monica had killed. The man who had tried to murder Sara a few days before had looked as if he could have sat down and helped her with her taxes.
“I’ve never been in the field,” Monica said abruptly.
“Excuse me?” Sara took a bite of her orange and discovered that all of her normal rules about appetite went right out the window when she had eaten next to nothing the day before. She peeled off another section and popped it into her mouth before she even had time to finish chewing the first.
“I’ve never been in the field,” Monica repeated. She poured herself a cup of coffee, added sugar, and then reached around Sara and into the refrigerator for cream. “And I haven’t been in so much as a fist fight since the ninth grade. If you’re looking for a badass, then I suggest that you look somewhere else.”
“That’s not what I was thinking,” Sara lied. She could not stop herself from looking down at the kitchen tile as she spoke. If she was this bad of a liar when dealing with a perfect stranger, then it was a small wonder that her father had always been able to tell when she was using.
“I’m not offended,” Monica said, and looked as if she meant it. “Everyone thinks that when they first learn that this operation exists. They usually meet agents like Aldo or Jane first, so that they think that every safe house is going to be staffed with ninjas.” Monica shrugged before taking a sip of her coffee and finding that it was to her liking. She reached into the basket on the kitchen island, took out a muffin for herself, and began to eat it in small and ladylike bites. “Ben is very good with computers. I’m very good with keeping people organized and focused.” Monica shrugged and gave her a small and almost conspiratorial smile. “The secret to herding cats is not to let them realize that they’re being herded.”
That was rather a more chilling statement than Sara liked to hear from a woman that she had been beginning to like. She looked up from her orange in time to see Lincoln and Jane moving from the same hallway, down which Lincoln had disappeared the night before. Though the both of them were impeccably groomed, Sara still felt her eyebrows crawling up towards her hairline. So, she noticed, were Monica’s.
Jane and Lincoln parted ways from one another at the entrance to the kitchen. Jane left, presumably in search of Aldo, while Lincoln went to find LJ. Lincoln gave Sara a courteous and nearly old-fashioned nod before he did so. “Mornin’, doc. Monica.”
“Good morning,” Sara answered as Monica waggled her fingers. Sara could not help but look back upon what Monica had said to her a few moments before and wonder how many people had stayed in this safe house after first learning what the Company was and how far it extended, and how many of them were actually able to go back to their normal lives again afterwards. Monica reminded Sara of a girl that she had gone to college with, Ben of her neighbor across the hall back in Chicago.
Lincoln had barely turned away from the entryway before he was nearly running over Ben, who had crept up behind him without making a sound. So maybe he wasn’t exactly like the neighbor, who tended to announce his presence loudly wherever he went. Maybe lessons in getting from one place to another like a ninja were a part of the anti-Company orientation that one got after signing on the dotted line.
Ben stepped to the side so that Lincoln could pass. “Clearly, he’s a morning person,” he said after Lincoln had disappeared without saying a word.
“He’s not bad,” Sara responded automatically, though she realized a bare second later that she didn’t know Lincoln nearly well enough to say that for herself. He was good enough that Michael had been willing to move heaven and earth in order to break him out of prison, and Michael had yet to be wrong in his assessment of a person.
“Aldo’s a bear in the morning, too,” Ben said. He rolled his shoulders and rubbed his neck before he added, “Speaking of that, tell me that there’s coffee. It’s way too early for a war zone, and there are way too many people in this house who could actually make that happen.” Monica reached out and tapped at the coffee carafe with one manicured nail. Ben made an appreciative sound and began searching the cabinets for a mug, while Sara glanced out of the kitchen and into the house proper again.
Agent Mahone emerged from one of the seemingly endless successions of hallways while Michael arrived from another. While neither of them looked as if he had actually slept, it was a different and far less sated kind of sleeplessness than the sort that had marked Lincoln and Jane while they were ambling through. Sara felt relieved even as Michael blew straight through without seeming to realize that she was there at all. Her conflicted feelings did not ease when Agent Mahone’s first act was to stride over to the couch where his son was still sleeping.
‘Stop acting like you’re still in high school,’ Sara thought as she went over to stand beside him.
“The sedative wore off a few hours ago,” Sara said. Agent Mahone was staring down at Cameron, his features taut but unreadable. Sara thought that the fact that the rest of his body language was tense to the point of being rigged to explode told the rest of the story quite well.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Agent Mahone asked, raising his head so that he could look Sara in the eye. “That he’s still sleeping.”
‘I’m not a psychiatrist,’ was Sara’s first thought. It took her a moment more to realize that Agent Mahone was not asking her as a federal agent seeking her professional opinion, but as a grieving parent looking to be reassured. She tucked a few loose strands of hair behind her ears and resolved to do her best.
“Sleeping excessively can be a symptom of both depression and post traumatic stress disorder,” Sara answered honestly. Agent Mahone closed his eyes and stayed that way for several seconds before he opened them again. “But it hasn’t even been a full twelve hours since the…trauma, so it very well might be that he’s just tired. I think…I think that your wife might have shielded him from a lot of it.” Sara of course had no idea if that was true at all, but it was about as close to a lie as she was willing to get. Agent Mahone’s swift and sardonic glance said that he knew it, too, damn him. “He doesn’t seem to be having too many nightmares, though, and that’s a good thing even if it’s too early to tell anything else. You’re still probably going to want to find someone for him to talk to on a regular basis once this is all over.” Probably someone for herself, too, Sara added silently.
“Yeah.” Agent Mahone rubbed his hand across his face. Sara noticed that he was wearing a good two days’ worth of stubble. “Thank you. For looking out for him last night.” Agent Mahone’s tone expressed his disgust that he had not been able to do it himself, as if anyone who looked at him could not tell that he had been on the verge of dropping. Thinking that he was failing if he was not effortlessly holding up the entire world. Sara knew another man like that.
“You’re welcome,” Sara said simply, without adding that she herself had benefited from being able to go back to her old job for a few hours. She touched Agent Mahone lightly on the arm before she went back into the kitchen so that he could have a few minutes alone with his son.
Michael had returned to the kitchen, shaved and dressed even though he still looked very tired. His lips curved when he caught sight of her. “Good morning.”
“Good morning.” Sara watched the curve of Michael’s mouth and the way that a dimple was put into his cheek when he smiled. She needed to kiss that mouth, desperately, and didn’t care that it would make the bizarre and dysfunctional atmosphere of the kitchen even more awkward as a result.
Sara put her hand on the back of Michael’s neck, possessive even though a part of her was insisting that the point was to let Michael go even though the rest of her hadn’t caught up with that memo yet, and angled his mouth down to meet hers. Michael let out a surprised, pleased exhalation before he returned the attention, his hand settling against the small of her back for a moment before he remembered their audience and dropped it. Sara’s skin tingled where it had been.
“That was nice,” Michael whispered to her when they had stepped away from her. He sounded confused, and Sara was glad to welcome one more member to her club.
She swallowed and said, rather than the whole list of things that she was thinking, “You don’t owe me anything, Michael.” Because if he thought that he did, she knew, there would be no stopping him from paying that debt. The very idea horrified Sara, even though she was not sure that she liked the possibility of letting him go any more.
Michael’s eyes darkened. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
Jesus, he was a terrible liar. Sara had no idea how he had gotten his plan this far, when he was so bad at it. Unless she was the only one that he could not lie to. That thought did not make Sara feel any better.
She wanted to kiss him again, but only said instead, “I made my own choices. None of them were your fault. Make yours.” If what either one of them felt was love, or even only the beginnings of it, then all right. But she would not carry on anything that was based upon obligation. Sara caught herself a second later and added, in a lower tone that hardly sounded like herself, “And so you know? That doesn’t mean that I’m waving the white flag, either.”
A startled laugh came from Michael’s mouth before he leaned back and studied Sara’s face for several seconds. Sara never knew what he was looking at when he stared at her like that. Sometimes she thought that he might be seeing the same beauty there that he saw in his buildings. “I know.” Their hands found each other even though Sara was not sure that either one of them had given the order to move/
Lincoln and Agent Mahone appeared at one end of the kitchen, Aldo and Jane at the other. The second group of people looked considerably happier than the first. While Jane and Aldo were both focused and intense, as if going into the field required several hours of mental preparation and they wanted to be sure that they didn’t waste a moment when they could be getting ready to kill people, there were storm clouds painted dark and fierce across Lincoln’s eyes. Sara scanned him and Agent Mahone both from their heads down to their feet and did not realize until she was done that she had been looking for blood. When she discovered that neither of them had a bruise to show, she was not sure that she actually felt better.
LJ seemed to materialize from nowhere behind his father. As Lincoln was in a temper that was only barely being held in by the boundaries of his skin, he seemed even larger than he did when he was calm. It was easy to see how LJ could have lingered in the shadow of that without being seen. He didn’t waste any time in going to stand by Jane. She raised startled eyes to Lincoln as the boy approached.
“LJ’s going to be going with you and Sara to Chicago,” Lincoln gritted. The words were barely intelligible; he was hardly able to move his jaw. Lincoln cast Agent Mahone a glare in addition to these words, as if Agent Mahone rather than his own teenaged son was the one who was misbehaving. Agent Mahone’s quirked eyebrow spoke of a great many worse things that he had seen, and suggested that Lincoln try harder the next time if he truly wanted to make an impression.
Jane’s jaw dropped, and she turned towards Aldo in preparation for him to put a halt to any such idiocy. Aldo only looked towards the ceiling for a few seconds, perhaps thinking of how much older LJ was than Lincoln and Michael had been when he abandoned them, and said, “It’s not as if we’re not breaking every other protocol that we have. There are more civilians on this mission than there are actual field agents.”
Jane continued to stare at Aldo as if she was sure that he was playing an ill-timed joke on them all and that he was surely going to put a halt to at any second. When that moment did not come, Jane snapped her mouth shut and gave both Sara and LJ swift jerks of her head. “Come on. We have a lot of ground to cover.”
Michael squeezed at Sara’s hand before he let her go. “Be careful,” he told her.
“You yourself.” Sara followed Jane and LJ out of the house, to one of the sleek SUVs that both sides seemed to believe were the end-all and be-all when it came to automotive transportation. Her eyes pricked and stung as the sun came far enough over the horizon to strike her full in the face.
“There is an extra pair of sunglasses in the glove compartment if you require them,” Jane said as she watched Sara blink rapidly and turn her face away. Her tone walked a curious line between concerned and detached, as if she already knew exactly why Sara needed to turn her face away from them all until she had composed herself again, and was only holding back because she did not want to push to far into someone else’s emotional space.
Sara took a swipe at each of her eyes before she put her seatbelt on and turned towards Jane. “I’m fine,” she said, and meant it. Jane took her at her word and pulled away from the house.
End Part Fourteen