Safe House - Chapter Twelve
Title: Safe House - Chapter Twelve
Fandom: Prison Break
Pairing: Sara Tancredi/Michael Scofield
Other Characters: Lincoln Burrows, Paul Kellerman, Aldo Burrows, Jane Phillips
Length: 10,643 words
Rating: PG-15 for some salty language. *g*
Summary: The words safe house conjure up a picture of a dark and fortified hideout, certainly not this plain but clean wooden house in the outer suburbs.Spoilers for Season One and Season Two. Pretty much AU from "Scan" onwards, it also uses events from the whole of Season Two. I think you could call this an AU with strong canon overtones - in other words, anything that you recognise from canon is not mine. Many thanks to sk56 for the beta and sarah_scribbles for the handholding. This story is part of a series, the rest of which you can find here.
Author's Note: I have made a few little edits on Chapter Eleven to fix one or two things I had basically forgotten to include. D'oh. Also? If it's been a while since you read Unexpected, you might want to take a moment to skim through that one. I'm just saying.
~*~
Sara sits and half-listens as her three travelling companions argue about rental cars and paper trails, staring out the window at the increasingly familiar landscape. She feels more nervous with every passing mile, because each one of those miles brings them closer to Washington, to their target, to what could be the beginning of the end. She twists her hands together in her lap, rubbing her damp palms down the front of her sweatpants, and tries not to think of just much is about to depend on her.
Michael has promised she won’t be alone when she attempts to retrieve her father’s last message, but she suspects he was only telling her what they both wanted to hear. They’re not going to be the ones calling the shots. She knows Michael’s father and Jane will do all they can to keep her safe, but her father died because of what he’d discovered in Washington. Thinking she’ll be able to just stroll into that teahouse and stroll out again would be very naïve, and she stopped being naïve the day Paul Kellerman shoved a gun in her face in the middle of a Chicago alley.
Michael gives her a reassuring smile every time their eyes meet, obviously hoping to make her feel more relaxed, but the gesture has the opposite effect. Almost twenty-four hours later and the memory of their illicit tryst in the bathroom - a public bathroom, for God’s sake - still has the power to make her blush right down to the soles of her feet.
She’s not quite sure when she became the type of woman who has sex in public places. Perhaps she always has been that woman, and it just took the right - or wrong - circumstances for her to realise it, or perhaps it just took the right man and the right amount of desperation. Staring at Michael’s familiar profile, she remembers her teasing words, that they’d have to ‘try this in a bed one day’. Despite her nervousness, the thought makes a hot ripple of hunger dance through the pit of her stomach.
Damn it.
She looks away, drawing in half a dozen long, slow breaths that - amazingly enough - manage to soothe her frayed nerves. She knows the enormity of what they’re about to do, and she knows she can’t afford to let herself be distracted by her feelings for Michael. But that’s easier said than done, she thinks bleakly, when those feelings seem to have coloured her every decision for the last three months.
When their train finally pulls into Union Station, Michael gets to his feet and slings his duffle bag over his shoulder. He glances at Lincoln, already waiting beside the exit, then at her. “You ready for this?”
In truth, she feels as though she’s about to throw up, but she’s long past the stage of feeling she has to save face in front of this man. Picking up her own bag, she shuffles sideways out of her seat, wincing as her leg muscles - too long in the one position - twinge in protest. “Can I say no?”
“I’m afraid not.” He smiles at her, and she feels the fleeting reassurance of his hand brushing against hers. “Maybe next time?"
The prospect of having to go through this a second time does nothing to lift her spirits. She briefly contemplates quipping that if he’s trying to make her feel better, he’s doing a terrible job, but that would only remind them both of everything they’ve done their best to leave behind. Forwards, not backwards, she tells herself sternly, then follows him to the train’s automatic exit doors.
Lincoln leads the way as they step down from the carriage, Michael at his shoulder. Kellerman is a few steps behind her, and she’s glad. She can’t look at his face without feeling a sudden, raw surge of anger, let alone make small talk as they push their way through the crowd. Michael’s heated touch may have chased away a small measure of the chill from her bones, but she already knows that nothing is ever going to make her forget those two hours alone with Paul Kellerman.
They’re halfway across the main floor of the station when she sees Lincoln and Michael exchange a silent look and a nod - not for the first time, she can’t help envying their ability to communicate without a single word - then Lincoln turns to speak to Kellerman over her shoulder. “Right, let's go -” he starts to say, but his words fade away, his gaze narrowing. “Where the fuck is he?”
Michael turns at the same time she does, and it only takes a few seconds for both of them to realise that Paul Kellerman is nowhere to be seen. Her heart sinks.
“He was standing right behind you!” Lincoln spits out in furious disbelief. By contrast, his brother sounds almost too calm.
“He’s gone.” Michael’s voice is hollow as he turns to scan the crowd behind them, the blood instantly draining from his face. Sara follows the line of his gaze, sucking in a sharp breath at the sight of the uniformed police officers converging on the train. Oh, God. No, no, no.
Lincoln is staring in the same direction, looking just as stricken as she feels. “The bastard set us up.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Michael grabs her hand and squeezes it, then nods at his brother. “Either way, we gotta go.”
They start to walk quickly, pushing their way through the crowd. Lincoln takes the lead, literally shouldering people out of his way. Michael is holding her hand so tightly that her fingers start to tingle, but she doesn’t care. Bruised fingers are nothing compared to the thought of letting go.
Sara’s never suffered from anything remotely resembling agoraphobia, but today she knows how it feels to be afraid of the crush of strangers’ bodies. She meets no one’s eyes as they shove their way through the crowd, but she can still feel them looking at her. Knowing her. Only the tight clasp of Michael’s hand keeps her anchored, centred, and it’s a relief when they reach street level, the clear Washington sky above their heads, cool air filling her lungs.
It’s a fleeting respite. She once again follows the line of Michael’s anguished gaze, and the bottom falls out of her stomach. She tears her eyes away from the flashing blue lights in the distance, throwing a beseeching glance at Michael. “What do we do now?” she asks, her voice choked with fear. Michael looks at her and his brother in turn, then over her shoulder towards the traffic. His gaze narrows, and she can literally see his mind racing, the cool calculation beneath the surface panic.
“Sara?” She looks at him expectantly, waiting for him to tell her that they need to run. He doesn’t. He takes her hand in his, and presses something into her palm. “Take this,” he mutters, not quite meeting her eyes. “Get in the taxi behind you and go straight to that address. Linc and I will get there when we can.”
Mute with shock, she stares down at her hand - he’s given her a wad of cash and the scrap of envelope with Jane’s address - and shakes her head, unable to believe what she’s just heard. He can’t possibly be sending her away. “I’m not leaving you,” she finally manages to choke out the words through lips that feel frozen and stiff.
“We’ve got no choice,” he insists urgently, pulling his duffle bag off his shoulder as he speaks. A few seconds later the strap is hooked over her shoulder and he’s staring into her eyes with an intensity that almost makes her want to take a step backwards. “One of us has to get to that address and you’ve got a better chance than me or Lincoln. And whatever your father left, he left it for you.”
He takes her by the shoulders, his finger digging into flesh and bone, his gaze burning into hers. “I love you.” She stares at him, shock once again stealing her voice, barely aware of the urgent press of his fingertips against her skin as he spins her around and pushes her away from him. “You have to go. Now.”
“Michael!” She almost trips over her own feet as she tries to turn around, to go back to him, but he’s already moving away from her, his eyes silently pleading with her to go, to leave him. The bag over her shoulder is heavy, thumping against her hip as she takes one step, then another, then another. Still not quite believing this is happening, she pulls open the rear passenger door of the waiting taxi and clambers inside, awkwardly pulling Michael’s bag into her lap as she sinks onto the backseat.
The driver barely lifts his head. “Where to?”
“Uh-” Sara stares down at the piece of paper in her hand, rattling off the Dupont Circle address Jane had given Michael, then adds a breathless, “Please hurry.” Her frantic gaze seeks and finds Michael’s through the car window. He’s staring at her as though he’s afraid he’s never going to see her again, and she’s suddenly afraid he’s right.
The young driver grunts an acknowledgement - whether it’s of the address or her plea for him to hurry, she’ll never know - then the lights change and they’re moving. She tries to keep Michael in view but Lincoln grabs his arm, pulling him back into the crowd, and they’re lost to her sight.
“Visiting from out of town?”
She flinches at the sound of the driver’s voice. “What?”
“Are you from out of town?” he repeats with a decided air of impatience, and she gives herself a mental shake.
Normal. Be normal. “Yes,” she says, surprised that she can sound so casual when her heart feels as though it’s pounding divots in her ribcage. “I’m visiting a friend for a few days.”
“Cool.” With that succinct observation, he turns up the volume on the car stereo - thankfully he’s listening to a CD, rather than the radio - and she can’t quite believe she’s managed to find a cab driver who doesn’t want to chat.
Sara sits back in her seat, doing her best to look like an ordinary passenger on an ordinary trip on an ordinary day. She knows she has no choice but to keep going, but it’s all she can do not to tell the driver to turn the car around. She still can’t believe that she’s alone again, that Michael forced her to leave them, and yet there’s a part of her that’s not surprised at all. He’d wanted her to reach the evidence that could exonerate Lincoln, but he’d also wanted to keep her from registering on the authorities’ collective radar. She’d be lying if she said she didn’t understand why he did what he did.
She looks down at the duffle bag in her lap, then the scrawled note in her hand, and her eyes begin to burn at the sight of Michael’s handwriting. She understands, she thinks darkly, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t furious, and she’s glad, because being angry is better than being afraid. Afraid for herself, for Michael, for Lincoln, afraid that her father may have died for nothing. If she’s angry, maybe she won’t let herself think of how easy it would be to tell the driver to take a quick detour via the closest bar, how easy it would be to dull the edges of her fear.
She presses her tongue hard against the back of her teeth, determinedly pushing away the insidious lure of blissful oblivion, and blinks away the damp prickling behind her eyes. She stares at the traffic around the taxi, studying faces and vehicles, her heart still beating fast. She feels almost foolish for expecting the worst, but quickly reminds herself that the line between caution and paranoia was blurred a long time ago. If Paul Kellerman is once again playing this hideous game as a free agent, it’s not only the Washington Police Department she’s running from.
It takes fifteen minutes to reach the address on the torn piece of paper, and each one of those minutes is filled with a dread so cloying she feels as though she can’t breathe. When the taxi turns into the street where Jane has apparently secured yet another safe house, Sara scans the street numbers with relief. She has no reason to believe that her driver is anything but what he appears to be, but she’s not prepared to take any chances. Once they’re within easy walking distance of the street number she needs, she leans forward in her seat. “Just drop me off here, thank you.”
He tells her the fare and she hands him far too much money, forcing a smile as she tells him to keep the change. His eyes widen, then he bobs his head and grins. “Have a nice day.”
I doubt it, she thinks but of course doesn’t say. Her stomach is churning as she climbs out of the car, dragging the heavy duffle behind her. Slinging it over one shoulder, she hitches her handbag over the other, then slams the taxi door shut. She walks slowly along the wrong side of the street, watching as the driver pulls away and eventually turns left at the end of the street. Taking a deep breath, she crosses the street quickly, trying to look everywhere at once, feeling as though the eyes of the whole damned world are on her.
She’s less than five feet away from her destination when she stops in her tracks, staring at the man standing outside the front door of the small apartment complex, her breath catching in her throat. He suddenly turns, letting her see his face, and her stride falters. It’s not Michael or Lincoln or even their father, but a completely unfamiliar dark-haired man in his twenties. Her hand tightens around the strap of Michael’s bag, her feet literally itching with the impulse to flee, then the man nods at her. “Ms. Tancredi.”
It’s not a question. Sara blinks, too taken aback not to answer. “Yes.”
“Ms. Phillips is expecting you.” He beckons her closer, waving her into the foyer of the building. “Apartment number eight, top floor,” he tells her as she passes, and she finds herself stammering a thank you. As she presses the button to call the elevator, a faint flicker of hope rises up inside her. Maybe Michael and Lincoln were able to outmanoeuvre the police after she’d left them. Maybe they’ve actually beaten her here and are waiting upstairs, and in a few minutes she will be able to tell Michael to his face exactly what she thinks of his diversionary tactics.
The elevator only has three floors to travel, but it seems to take an eternity. She leans against the wall and stares at her reflection in mirrored tiles opposite, noting without surprise that she looks as nervous as she feels. A few seconds after her hesitant knock on the apartment door, she finds herself staring at Jane. “Are they here?” she asks without preamble, knowing that Jane won’t give a damn about non-observance of etiquette.
The other woman shakes her head. “No.”
Oh, God. It seems impossible that one word could sting so much, but it does and she feels as though someone’s shoved a knife in her belly. She leans against the door frame, Michael’s bag dangling from her hand. Without a word, Jane picks up the discarded bag, takes her by the elbow and draws her into the apartment, shutting the door firmly behind them.
“Tell me what happened,” she says with a calm Sara would envy if she could think of anything else but the fact that Michael and Lincoln are not here.
“We got to Union Station and suddenly police cars were everywhere,” Sara mutters unsteadily, her hand groping for the chair that’s magically materialised in front of her.
Jane nods unhappily. “We picked up a call to the local 911 five minutes before your train was due at Union Station.”
Sara grimaces. “Our train was a few minutes early, I think.”
Jane’s gaze locks with hers. “And the police were waiting for you.” Sara nods, and Janes lifts her hands in an uncharacteristic gesture of defeat. “I tried to contact Lincoln as soon as we picked up the 911 call, but he didn’t answer.” Her jaw tightens. “His phone has since been switched off.”
Sara closes her eyes in despair. She doesn’t remember Lincoln’s cell phone ringing while she was still with them. If it had rung after Michael had pushed her into that taxi, they would have answered Jane’s call, even if they’d been running for their lives. The fact that they hadn’t - or couldn’t - has a tight knot of dread sinking to the pit of her stomach.
“Michael gave me this address and pushed me into a taxi.” She drops into the chair, her handbag sliding off her shoulder to the floor. “He said we needed to split up and that I had a better chance of avoiding capture.”
“He was right.” Jane says briskly as she walks out of the room, returning half a moment later with a glass of water that she presses into Sara’s hands. “You weren’t followed?”
Sara hesitates. She’d done her best to watch her back, but the traffic had been heavy and she’d been in no state for noticing minute details. “Not as far as I’m aware, but I can’t be absolutely certain, no.” She stares down at the glass in her hands. “Was it Kellerman who called the police?”
Jane leans against a long antique bureau, her arms folded across her chest. “We’re not sure.”
“He vanished as soon as we stepped off the train,” Sara tells her, and the bitterness in her voice surprises even her.
Jane frowns. “I doubt he’s very far away.”
Sara takes a sip of water, more for something to do than anything else. “What makes you think he didn’t just cut and run?”
“Because that’s not his style,” Jane replies flatly, and not for the first time, Sara wonders how well she knows Paul Kellerman. “I suspect he anticipated you would try to shut him out of the retrieval operation, and took the opportunity afforded by the appearance of the police to pick up his own agenda once more.”
Swallowing the urge to remind Jane that shutting Kellerman out had been her idea, Sara nods. “So, now what?”
“Are you hungry? There’s food in the refrigerator.”
Sara shakes her head. She knows she should eat something, but her stomach still feels as though it’s filled with broken glass. “No, thanks.”
Jane uncrosses her arms, pushing herself away from the wooden bureau. “Aldo is pulling every string possible to ascertain Michael and Lincoln’s current status. I’m expecting a call from him any moment.” Her disconcertingly forthright gaze flicks over Sara, but not unkindly so. “While we’re waiting, perhaps you’d like to freshen up?”
Sara hesitates. All she wants to do is find out if Michael and Lincoln are safe. Quite frankly, she couldn’t care less about the state of her hair or her clothes. But she has to admit that Jane has a point. A shower and a change of clothes might help her feel like less of a refugee. “Fine.” Aware she sounds less than gracious, she adds a hasty, "Thank you."
Jane points her in the direction of both the bathroom and an airy bedroom, and Sara finds herself staring longingly at the bed, suddenly so weary that it almost feels as though her bones are crumbling away. One day soon, she promises herself, she is going to sleep for twelve hours straight in a real bed. Maybe even sixteen hours.
Before that particular train of thought can follow the painfully obvious path to the man responsible for her being in this room without him, she puffs out a loud sigh and swings both bags onto the bed. When she catches sight of the bills clumsily stashed in the zippered side compartment of her purse, her eyes widen. The last thirty minutes have been such a blur, she scarcely remembers the trip, let alone what she did with Kellerman’s money after she’d paid the taxi driver.
She pulls the wad of money out of the side pocket, and with it come the two slightly battered paper cranes Michael had retrieved from Kellerman in Gila. Her throat tightens at the sight of them, remembering how solemnly he’d returned them to her, the unspoken promises they represented. Carefully putting them to one side - one day she’ll have the damned things bronzed and put on her mantle, she decides with an unexpected flash of humour - she reaches into her handbag for her wallet, intent on putting the cash in a more secure place. Her hand brushes against something very unfamiliar, and she frowns.
Pulling it out of her bag, she stares at the GPS unit Michael had bought from the Target in Springfield. “What the hell?” Turning on her heel, she picks up her handbag and heads straight back to the main living room and to Jane.
The other woman eyes the unit with interest. “Yours?”
“No, and I have no idea why it’s in my handbag -” Sara breaks off, her thoughts furiously backtracking over the last few days, images and words flashing through her head. “He swapped them,” she blurts out loudly, her hand tightening around the GPS as though it’s her last link to Michael and maybe it is.
Jane frowns. “Who?”
“Michael. He swapped them,” she says again, her words tripping over themselves in her haste to explain. “A few days ago, Michael put a tracker in my purse.” She scrabbles through the contents of her handbag, then gives up and tips everything out onto the coffee table and begins to frantically sort through lip balm and dental floss and pens and tampons and antiseptic hand wash. There’s nothing else in her bag that doesn’t belong to her, she realises, and feels a sudden flicker of hope. “So if I have this-”
“Then Michael should have the tracker on him,” Jane finishes the thought for her.
“Yes.” Sara feels a sudden burst of hope, but it’s just as quickly swamped by a wave of frustration. “But if they’re already in custody, what good will it do us?”
Jane takes the unit from her hand, a rare smile touching her lips. “You’d be surprised.” She picks up a wireless earpiece from the table and hooks it over her ear. “We’ve snatched Lincoln from the police once before. I dare say we could manage it a second time.”
Sara watches Jane as she activates the GPS unit with a few casual keystrokes, then suddenly remembers something else. "Michael's police scanner should be in his bag too, if you need it?"
Another rare smile from Jane. "Thanks, but our people in the field are already fully equipped." With that, she lifts her hand to touch her wireless earpiece. “I need to make a few calls,” she offers with a faint air of apology. “You have time to take that shower, if you wish.”
Sara frowns. She doesn’t want to waste time showering, not now that there’s a chance of finding Michael and Lincoln. She wants to sit beside Jane and stare at the display screen of the GPS, watching the flashing coordinates that will translate into Michael and Lincoln’s position. She wants to listen to Jane’s one-sided conversations with Aldo Burrows and tell herself that he’ll be able to find his sons before the Company does. She wants to visit the place her mother loved best and take the first step towards ending this nightmare. “How soon can we -?”
Jane holds up one hand, then begins to speak to a third party via her earpiece. “The daughter is with me and we have the means to locate the other parties. Call me.” Disconnecting, she shakes her head. “Voicemail,” she mutters with unmistakable loathing, then glances at Sara. “I’m waiting for confirmation on the arrangements for your visit to the teahouse.” She pulls off the wireless earpiece, gently rubbing the top of her ear with a rueful smile. “Our profiler believes if your father did leave something for you, he would have made sure that you, and only you, would be the one to retrieve it.”
“That’s what Michael said, too.” She doesn’t stumble over his name, and she’s glad. She has the feeling that Jane Phillips already knows far too much about her feelings for Michael Scofield.
“The four of you spent almost two days in each other’s company.” The other woman gives her a searching look. “And you didn’t discuss your real destination within earshot of Paul Kellerman?”
Sara returns her gaze steadily. “No.”
“You’re certain?”
Sara hesitates. “I can’t be certain,” she admits reluctantly, “not when it comes to him.”
She and Jane share an unexpected glance of perfect understanding, then Jane nods towards the bathroom. “Please, feel free to use whatever you need.”
Knowing a dismissal - however polite - when she hears one, Sara doesn’t bother arguing. “Thank you.”
Returning to the bedroom, she rummages through Michael’s duffle bag to retrieve her toothbrush and a set of clean clothes. She still can’t believe he managed to correctly guess her bra size - she doubts any of his Loyola professors could have ever dreamed he’d use his college degree for such a practical application. She closes her eyes, letting herself remember his hands cupping her breasts with gentle reverence, his long fingers stroking and teasing, then she shakes her head, pushing the memory away. She can’t do this, not now.
Once installed in the bathroom, she shuts the door firmly behind her and does her best to put Michael out of her head. She pulls her hooded sweatshirt over her head, and her best suddenly isn’t good enough. She catches a faint hint of lemon soap and something else that sends a flurry of butterflies arching through her belly - God, she can still smell him, them, on her clothes.
She wants very much to bury her face in her shirt, inhale the scent of him until it chases away the memory of his face as he watched her leave him, but she doesn’t. She feels brittle and breakable, wound too tight, and she knows that wallowing in everything that’s happened between them will only serve to make her feel worse.
She takes a deep breath and puts the shirt aside, quickly stripping off the rest of her clothes, rolling them into a neat bundle. Perhaps she should simply throw them away, but she’s strangely reluctant to dispose of them. She has only a vague memory of thanking Michael for buying them for her. When she sees him, she promises herself, she will thank him again. As soon as she’s finished telling him exactly what she thinks of his last minute diversionary tactics, she thinks for the second time in an hour. Right now, though, she’ll shower and she’ll change and if she doesn’t let herself think too much about the events of the last week, she’ll be okay.
After liberating a tube of delicately scented and extremely overpriced face cleanser from the well-stocked bathroom cabinet (something that makes quite a change from the other safe houses she’s found herself in over the last week, she thinks dryly) then turns around, intent on having the hottest shower in living memory. When her gaze falls on the oversized white bathtub nestled beside the shower, she’s suddenly somewhere else, with someone else. Her chest feels tight and cold, her lungs constricted and aching with the panicked need to breathe, and she realises too late that she is far from okay.
Gripping the edge of the sink with both hands, she closes her eyes, remember the feel of wet hair clinging to her face, the almost antiseptic smell of soap and clean towels. Her mouth dries, her hands white-knuckled on the sink, the smell of burning flesh - it’s not real, it can’t be - suddenly thick in her nose and her throat. She remembers cold water pouring into her ears, the feel of the metal chain pressed hard against her teeth.
She remembers knowing she was about to die.
Oh, God. She feels sick, ripples of heat and cold fluttering across her skin. She’d thought she was stronger than this, that she’d managed to put it behind her, burned off the fear with her anger. She’d been wrong.
This has happened before, in Gila, and she’d ended up huddled at the bottom of an ancient shower stall, trying to drown out both the world and the thoughts inside her head. That time, Michael had been there to pull her through to the other side. But Michael isn’t here now, and although she knows Jane is only in the next room, Sara has never felt more alone in her life.
She sucks in several long breaths, desperately trying to pull herself together, keep herself together. Opening her eyes, she stares at her reflection for a long moment, and then she feels a sudden surge of anger. These people have already taken so much from her. She can’t - won’t - let them take anything else.
Narrowing her eyes at the pristine white tub, she turns her back on it, pulling open the glass shower door with an abrupt jerk. She stands underneath the hot water for a long time, unable to stop her furious tears, tears that dissolve in the steam and the heat as she lets herself weep for everything she’s lost and everything she still has to lose. By the time she twists the faucets off, she feels as hollow as a drum, stretched too tight, but her eyes are dry. That’s enough, she tells herself fiercely, and for the first time, she believes it. For the first time, she knows she can and will do whatever it takes in order to end this nightmare.
With Jane’s concerned questions about Kellerman echoing in her thoughts, she wraps a clean towel around herself, crosses the room and opens the bathroom cabinet to stare at the small cardboard boxes she’d noticed earlier. She grimly studies the forced smiles of the model on the front of each box for a moment, eventually selecting a dark-haired girl who looks as though she couldn’t be a day over seventeen. A quick search through the vanity drawers unearth a pair of dressmaking scissors, old but sharp enough for the task. She looks at herself in the mirror, takes a deep breath, and curls her fingers through the cold metal handle of the scissors.
Forty minutes later, a woman she barely recognises stares back at her, a woman with dark brown hair that skims her jaw. She can’t remember the last time her hair was this short. Second year of college, she thinks, suddenly remembering she’d dyed it over a small bathroom sink on that occasion as well. She reaches up a tentative hand, running her fingers through the tousled ends of her shaggy bob, then dresses quickly - despite the darkness of her mood, she marvels once again at Michael’s uncanny eye for scale - before going in search of Jane.
She finds her ensconced in the small study at the end of the hall, this time with a cell phone presses to her ear. “I’ll call you back,” Jane murmurs into the phone, then looks at Sara. To her relief, the other woman asks no questions, merely raising one eyebrow in approval. “That colour suits you.”
Sara shrugs with faint embarrassment. “Thanks.” Under different circumstances, she might have loved the new look, but it’s hard to find pleasure in a change that’s literally been made to help keep her alive.
Jane tilts her head to one side, still studying her, then she nods. “Very different look for you."
“That was the idea, I guess.” Sara manages a smile. “Should I be worried that you had a selection of hair dyes in the bathroom cupboard?"
Jane shrugs. “Part of being prepared for anything.”
Just like Michael, Sara thinks, and wishes she hadn’t, because the thought of Michael makes her feel as though someone has dug into her chest and scooped everything out. In an effort to distract herself, she gestures towards the phone in Jane’s hand. “Anything?”
“I spoke to Aldo while you were in the shower.”
Sara’s mouth dries. “And?”
“He’s fairly confident his team will be able to retrieve Michael and Lincoln.”
Sara doesn’t want to zero in on the one worrying word in that sentence, but she can’t help it. “Fairly confident?”
“There’s always room for doubt, unfortunately,” Janes says quietly, then the shrill peal of her cell phone signals the end of their conversation. “Give me a minute, will you? We can’t move until we get the final word from our contact. Could be five minutes, could be an hour.” She nods in the direction of the kitchen. “You should try to eat something.”
Once again dismissed - once again, not unkindly - Sara turns on her heel and walks away, gripped by a frustration that makes her want to slam doors very loudly. If she was out there, actually doing something instead of absolutely nothing, she might not feel quite so useless. However, because she is twenty-nine and not fourteen, Sara slams no doors but instead takes up the suggestion of food, making her way to the kitchen.
Ten minutes later, she's made herself a peanut butter sandwich and a cup of coffee, but it’s hard to drum up any enthusiasm for either of them. The sandwich is the first real food - Twinkies will never count as food as far as she’s concerned - she’s had in days, and it should taste a lot better than it does. Perhaps if her stomach wasn’t tied up in tight little knots, she would appreciate it more. But how can she when she’s sitting here in comfort and Michael and Lincoln could be anywhere? They could be dead, the insidious voice in her head whispers, and she closes her eyes in despair. Pushing aside her half-empty coffee cup, she drops her head into her hands, trying and failing not of her father and Michael and Lincoln and the still tender marks around her wrists. Damn it. She feels the familiar burn of angry tears stinging her eyes, the raw grief that hollows out her chest, and she wants it to stop.
Afterwards, she doesn’t try to blame the waiting, or the utter feeling of helplessness. Afterwards, she will realise that she was testing herself, wanting to know how tenuous her grip on her control actually was. Because if she had the strength to do this one thing, she would have the strength for everything else. Afterwards, she'll realise a lot of things, but right now, all she knows is that she's staring at the half-bottle of scotch she’d stumbled across when searching the cupboards for the peanut butter.
She stares at the bottle for what feels like a long time. She doesn’t pour herself a shot. She doesn’t put it back in the cupboard, but she doesn’t pour herself a shot. It’s a small victory, but a victory nevertheless, and she learned long ago to find the positive in any situation.
“You don’t want to do that,” Jane says casually from the doorway.
Sara flicks one fingernail against the peeling corner of the label on the bottle, and she wonders if it’s Jane or Aldo who has the nervous label-peeling tic. “I do, actually.” Perhaps she should be surprised that this woman knows she’s a recovering addict, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that no one’s secrets are safe. “But I won’t.” She looks up at Jane. “And that’s the important thing.”
Jane nods but says nothing, waiting. Letting out her breath, Sara gets to her feet, picks up the bottle and walks across the kitchen to the sink. Turning, she catches Jane's eye, feeling the need to be polite, even though she doubts Jane would feel much attachment to an old bottle of cheap scotch. "May I?" When the other woman nods, Sara unscrews the cap and pours the scotch away, every last drop. The familiar scent of it makes her nose twitch and her stomach clench, but she suddenly feels lighter, as though she’s slipped out of her old skin.
Jane raises one dark blonde eyebrow. “Surely maintaining sobriety is more a matter of self-control rather than simply ridding one’s self of temptation?”
Sara suppresses the old flicker of resentment, the familiar urge to insist that she knows best when it comes to her own demons. She can’t help wondering if Jane is this direct and no-nonsense with everyone. If so, it’s no wonder Lincoln entrusted LJ to her care.
"Quite right." Tossing the empty bottle in the trash, she turns to regard Jane calmly. “But better safe than sorry. Any news?”
A quiet admiration gleams briefly in Jane’s blue eyes, then she nods briskly. “We have a lock on their current position.”
Sara stares at her. “Are they in police custody?”
“No.”
Sara’s heart lurches. “They’re free?”
“No.” Jane looks at her steadily. “It appears that they weren’t actually taken into custody by the Washington police.”
Sara frowns, shaking her head as she walks back to the chair she’d just vacated. “But the police cruisers were almost on top of us, I saw them!” She doesn’t want to ask the next question, but she has to know. “The Company?”
Jane shakes her head. “FBI.”
Sara is very glad she’s sitting down. Putting her elbows on her knees, she bows her head as the blood seems to swirl away through her body, her hands and feet starting to tingle coldly. Mild shock, the practical part of her brain informs her, but it doesn’t make her feel any less wretched.
She feels Jane’s hand on her shoulder. “This isn’t necessarily bad news, Sara.”
The unfamiliar gentleness in the other woman’s voice does nothing to reassure her. “How can you say that?”
“Because their father and I still have a few very influential friends in the FBI.”
Sara looks up at her, startled. “What are you saying? Are they in FBI custody, or are they not?”
“Aldo is working on that now,” she announces calmly, then lifts her hand from Sara’s shoulder, her tone once again brisk and efficient. “In the meantime, you and I have somewhere to be.”
Remembering Michael’s reassuring words - you won’t be alone, I promise you that - Sara shoots Jane a concerned glance. “Just the two of us?”
The other woman slips one arm through a shoulder holster - pistol gleaming silver against the white of her shirt, then fastens the buckle with practiced fingers. She gives Sara a wry smile that warms her normally cool expression. “You’ll have all the backup you need.” Picking up the jacket she’d earlier draped over the back of the kitchen chair, she looks at Sara expectantly. “Are you ready for this?”
Sara takes a deep breath. She’s no less nervous than she was when Michael asked this very same question as their train pulled into Union Station, but this time she doesn’t hesitate. “Let’s go.”
~*~
Despite being huddled behind the tinted windows of a large SUV driven by an obviously armed-to-the-teeth man with a shaved head and a neck as thick as her right thigh, Sara’s second ride through the streets of Washington is no less nerve-wracking than her first. There’s a second man - operative, she corrects herself - in the front passenger seat, scanning their surroundings in silence, his eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. It had taken a moment for Sara to realise it was the man who’d first greeted her at the front door of Jane’s apartment building. The two men are very different in appearance, and Sara can’t help wondering if their roles within Jane’s team are just as diverse.
It’s hard to feel threatened in such company, but now there is nothing to distract her from the knowledge that Michael and Lincoln’s safety is still anything but secured. Knowing it will do no good to let the fear grab hold of her, drag her down until she can’t think straight, she takes several deep breaths and forces herself to focus on the sound of Jane’s voice.
“The manager’s name is Lois Hui.” Beside her, Jane seems to be doing a dozen things at once - scrolling through a PDA, making call after call on her cell phone, issuing directions to the man behind the wheel - but her manner is as unhurried and cool as always. “She’s been the owner of the business since 1975. Widowed since 1982. Two adult children, five grandchildren.” Her gaze meets Sara’s. “We’re working on the assumption your father would have made contact with her.”
“What if he didn’t?” Jane frowns, but Sara presses on undeterred. “Not to throw cold water on your assumptions, but my father wasn’t exactly the type of person to trust anyone outside his inner circle.”
“It appears your father knew quite well what he’d discovered could get him killed,” Jane points out gently. “Desperate people commit desperate acts, Sara. Sometimes they even put their trust in a stranger.”
The other woman’s tone is casual, but she doubts Jane says anything without first calculating the impact of her words. Swallowing hard, Sara turns her head to stare out through the tinted window. Jane is right, of course. It wasn’t only her father who had put his life in the hands of a stranger. Michael had done that almost every day inside the walls of Fox River. He had put his life in her hands the moment they’d met.
And now she was doing the very same thing, putting her life in the hands of a woman she barely knew. Running a distracted hand through her now-dry hair, she turns away from the window. “Why are you doing this?”
Jane blinks, obviously taken aback by the blunt question. “What do you mean?”
“I know why you’re going after The Company,” Sara says hastily. “But you’re looking after Lincoln’s son and now you’re looking after me.” Sara watches Jane’s face, hoping for a glimpse of an ordinary woman beneath the cool, professional exterior. “Both of which could possibly get you killed.”
“I was married once,” Jane says flatly, quickly, almost as though she wants the words out of her mouth and done with. “We had a child.”
It’s Sara’s turn to blink. She opens her mouth to ask where the husband and child are now, then realises she already knows the answer. Jane’s use of past tense and the sudden emptiness in her usually bright blue eyes makes it all too painfully clear. “The Company?”
Jane nods only once, an abrupt jerk of her head. “I was never able to prove it, of course.” She clears her throat, smoothes one hand down the perfectly smooth front of her dark jacket, long fingers straightening her already straight lapels, and Sara has the abrupt impression of someone pulling a cloak around themselves, hiding themselves from view.
Be careful what you wish for, she thinks unhappily. She had wanted to know more about this woman, why she would go to such lengths to protect someone else’s family, and now she wants nothing more than to forget what she’s just learned. "I'm sorry."
“It was a long time ago,” Jane tells her with an unmistakable air of finality, and Sara knows their conversation is over.
Silence sits between them until the SUV reaches the intersection that will take them through to the street where their target is located. “How is this going to work?” Sara’s voice sounds small and tight, even to her own ears.
“Hodges,” Jane nods to the man in the front passenger seat, “will check things out inside first, then watch the rear entrance of the teahouse.” Her gaze slides across to the man in the driver’s seat. “Pearce and I will look after things out front.”
Even toned down and in plain English, Jane's explanation of what's about to happen makes her shiver. Sara bites her bottom lip - an old habit she’d thought she’d banished years ago - in an effort to stop herself from telling Jane that she can’t do this alone. She knows that they will only have one chance to do this right, and this is the way it has to be done. “Okay.”
Jane gives her a reassuring smile. “You’ll be fine.”
“So you keep saying,” Sara mutters, wondering if it’s possible to feel any further away from ‘fine’ than she does at this moment. She doubts it. When the SUV pulls up a few doors down from their destination, she doubts it even more.
If she wasn’t so busy thinking of everything that might go wrong once she steps inside those doors, it would be quite interesting to watch her fellow travellers go through their final preparations. The ordinary wireless cell phone earpieces are exchanged for sleek black versions, their conversation peppered with terms she doesn’t understand and hopes she never does, the air of rapidly building anticipation. She watches from behind the tinted window as Hodges leaves them and walks swiftly to the entrance of the teahouse, suddenly looking like any other Washington inhabitant in search of an early lunch.
After a very long five minutes, Jane lifts her hand to her earpiece. “Yes?” She listens intently for a few seconds, then almost smiles. “Good.” She looks at Sara. “You’re good to go.”
Sara slowly unbuckles her seatbelt, then her hand finds her purse on the seat beside her. She and Jane had decided she needed to present as normal a front as possible, hence the casual clothes and handbag. Her stomach is churning coldly, but she thinks of her father, of the small paper birds in her purse, of promises and trust and love, and she opens the car door and steps out onto the pavement.
It’s been almost fifteen years since she last walked through this door. The space around her is filled with both cool and warm colours, the walls cluttered with an eclectic mix of artwork, the dark wooden tables arranged to give the illusion of privacy. The queue at the counter is six people deep, and she quickly scans the room, knowing she can’t afford to waste that much time. A black clad waitress, her hands laden with dirty china, is negotiating her way between two nearby tables, and Sara quickly seizes the opportunity.
“Excuse me, please. I’d like to speak to the manager?”
The waitress gives her a curious look, but nods. “Sure.” She gestures with her overburdened hands. “I’ll let her know as soon I ditch these.”
With nothing else to do but wait, Sara draws back into a quiet corner, gazing around the teahouse at the happily oblivious customers going about the simple business of eating and drinking. She inhales deeply, and the scent of fragrant tea and cut flowers instantly whisks her back in time. She remembers trailing her fingers along that wall there, the paint smooth beneath her fingertips. Her mother had taught her how to eat with chopsticks in that corner booth. She remembers hesitantly tasting slippery noodles and fragrant soup that had made the inside of her mouth come alive. She feels the phantom touch of her mother’s hand on hers, and her eyes blur with the unexpected threat of tears.
Focus.
“May I help you?”
Sara turns to find herself almost nose to nose with an extremely well preserved Eurasian woman. Smooth, unlined skin, short black hair cut in a blunt bob, her dark green eyes gleaming with curiosity. She remembers this woman, Sara realises with a start.
“Mrs Hui?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Sara,” she begins - she and Jane had decided to leave her last name out of any initial discussion - her gaze trained on the older woman’s face. “This is probably going to sound crazy, but I think you may have something here for me?”
The woman frowns. “What kind of something?” She glances towards the serving counter. “If you’ve placed a special order for tea leaves, Jacob will look after -”
“No, I’m not here to pick up an order.” Fighting the sudden urge to laugh - how can she not, this is beyond absurd - Sara takes a deep breath. “Actually, I’m hoping you have something my father may have left for me. An envelope, maybe?”
There is not the faintest hint of recognition on the woman’s face, and Sara’s heart sinks. “I’m sure you don’t remember me, but my mother and I used to come here often when I was a child.” The woman says nothing, and Sara begins to despair. “Please, I need your help. This is very important.”
Lois Hui studies her for a long moment, and Sara feel cold pinpricks of sweat start to dot her scalp. “If it is so important, why would your father entrust it to a stranger?”
“Because he couldn’t reach me to give it to me in person,” Sara tells her, the words as bitter as cloves on her tongue. Oh, Dad. “He left me a message before he died,” she says quietly, knowing there’s nothing to be gained from keeping anything back. Not now. “He told me to look in the place my mother loved best.”
Again the woman studies her, taking in Sara's face and hair, her bright green eyes hardly seeming to blink. “There was a man here last week,” she finally murmurs, as if she’s talking to herself. “He didn’t give me his name.” Her gaze meets Sara’s, then flicks away again. “He showed me a picture of his wife and his little girl. Told me how much they had loved coming here.”
Sara feels heat prick behind her eyes. She’d forgotten about the ancient photograph her father used to keep in his wallet. “That was my mother and me.” The woman’s gaze sweeps over her newly cropped and dyed hair, and Sara hastily adds, “My hair was red until a few hours ago.”
Lois Hui nods. “What did you say your name was?”
“Sara. Sara Tancredi.”
Once again, the older woman studies her, long enough for panic to start gnawing at her, long enough for her knees to start trembling. Finally, she smiles warmly. ‘I may be able to help you.”
Sara feels her whole body sag with relief. She lets out a shaky breath, sending up a silent prayer of thanks. “My dad left something with you?”
“That depends, my dear.”
Sara blinks. “On what?”
The older woman smiles. “Every good secret has a password, Miss Tancredi.”
Sara’s hands curl into tight, tense fists at her sides, her mind painfully blank. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what it could be.”
Lois Hui’s smile falters. “Then I’m afraid I cannot help you,” she insists gently, and Sara feels panic clutch at her chest.
What the hell had her father been thinking? Making her play Twenty Questions with a complete stranger? Making her come up with a secret password when they’d hardly had a civil conversation in the last ten years? It’s hard to believe that her father and Michael may have had something more than herself in common, and yet here she is, trying desperately to decipher her father's cryptic clue. “Please, I’m begging you. My father died for what he gave you.”
Indecision flickers in the other woman’s face, then she leans closer, as if to impart a secret of her own. “It’s a belief you have tried to follow your whole life.”
Sara closes her eyes, desperately trying to filter out the sounds of clinking cutlery and customers' voices, the complicated scent of hot food and perfume and tea, desperately flinging herself backwards through her life with her father. Part of her insists her father didn’t know her well enough to set such a challenge, but her heart knows it’s not as simple as that. She opens her mind a little more, snatching at every memory she can find, and suddenly finds her thoughts filling with a sterile white room, a heartbreakingly familiar voice casually reciting the words she’d treasured as long as she can remember.
Thank you, Michael. Opening her eyes, she meets Lois Hui’s gaze unflinchingly. “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
The older woman smiles. “You have your mother’s eyes.” Before Sara can respond, she touches her arm lightly, then nods. “Wait here, please.” She walks quickly past the front counter and vanishes into a small office, returning almost immediately with a small white envelope in her hand. “I saw his face on the news the other day,” she murmurs as she puts the envelope into Sara’s hand. “I am very sorry you have lost him.”
It takes a few seconds for her to find her voice, and even then her words sound breathless and fragile. “Thank you.”
The cell phone in her purse chooses that moment to ring. Nodding at Mrs Hui, Sara steps away from the counter and pulls the phone out of her bag, flipping it open with hands that are trembling with both relief and adrenaline. “Hello?”
As always, Jane sounds far more calm than Sara feels. “Any progress?”
She grins into the phone as she shoves the envelope into the depths of her purse. “I have it.”
“That’s very good, because we need to move. Now.”
Sara’s sense of accomplishment instantly vanishes. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ll explain later. Go out through the back entrance. Hodges will meet you there.”
Her heart suddenly pounding, Sara flips the phone shut and turns to the woman beside her. “Is there another way out of here?”
Mrs Hui doesn’t bat a proverbial eyelid at the question, and Sara vaguely wonders if anything surprises this woman. “Yes, through the kitchen. It leads into the alleyway.”
Sara gives her a grateful smile, taking a few seconds to reach out and grasp her hand. “Thank you so much.”
The young kitchen hands don’t spare her a second glance as she walks quickly through their domain, and it doesn’t take long for her to reach the back entrance. She pushes open the heavy door and steps into the alleyway, her nose wrinkling as she exchanges the pleasant atmosphere for the teahouse for the more earthy scents of trash and tar and dust. The door slams shut loudly behind her in the same instant Paul Kellerman points his gun at her. “I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly feeling the déjà vu here.”
Frozen, she stares first at Kellerman, then at Hodges, who is lying utterly still on the ground a few feet away. Oh, God, no.
Kellerman smiles. “I know, I know. So close and yet so far, right?”
Oddly enough, it’s the smile that banishes her fear and reignites her anger. “You called the police from the train.”
“Not guilty,” he tells her. “I believe that was the work of the teenaged stoners in the next carriage.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that, because in her mind he’d been guilty of so many things, it’s hard to accept that he’s innocent for once. “You expect me to believe that?”
He shrugs. “I figured that Team Scofield wasn’t going to keep me around too long. All I did was take the chance to slip away.”
“So you could follow me here,” she says flatly.
“Look, Sara, I’d love to stay and chat, but why don’t you just hand over the disk, and we can put this all behind us. You go your way, I’ll go mine.”
“Disk?” The small white envelope suddenly seems very heavy in her purse. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Kellerman smiles once more. “You never were a particularly good liar, Sara.”
She lifts her chin, her hand tightening on the strap of her purse. If this is how it ends, so be it, but she will not give him the satisfaction of yielding to him. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”
He takes a step towards her, then another, and she feels her skin start to crawl with fear. “Sara,” he begins, but a screech of tires drowns out the sound of her name from his lips, his eyes widening as he stares over her shoulder. The sudden roar of a gunshot makes her flinch and Kellerman’s arm jerk. His face turns white, pale against the dark pattern of blood flowering over his right shoulder.
“Sara!” Spinning around at the sound of her name, she stares at the unfamiliar black van, at Michael’s face as he flings open the back door for her, then at his outstretched hand. “Come on!”
Déjà vu, Kellerman had said. He’d been right.
This time, she doesn’t hesitate and she doesn’t look back. She rushes toward the van - there’s an unfamiliar car behind it, yet another SUV - and grabs Michael’s hand and letting him pull her into the back of the vehicle. The door slams behind her and the van roars away, and just like last time she doesn’t fall, because Michael is holding her tight, pulling her down onto the seat beside him. She fumbles in her purse, then thrusts the envelope into his hands, suddenly afraid of losing it, wasting it. “Here.”
She’s vaguely aware of Michael handing the envelope to his father in the front passenger seat - she hadn’t noticed anyone but Michael - then their hastily murmured conversation. It’s only when Michael touches her face that she realises she’s shaking violently, her heart pounding so hard she can barely speak. “Is he dead?” She licks her dry lips, trying to get the words out but everything seems disjointed and not making much sense at all. “Kellerman, I mean.”
“I don’t know.” He touches her face, his fingers sliding along the curve of her jaw, his eyes burning into hers, as though he can't believe she's this close to him. “Either way, he won’t be coming after us.”
“He shot Hodges,” she hears herself say, and this time Aldo Burrows is the one to answer her.
“I know," he mutters wearily, then jerks his head towards the back of the van. "The second team will take care of Hodges and Kellerman." It takes her a few seconds to realise two things; one, that he's referring to the SUV that had been behind them, and two, there was more than a hint of satisfaction in his voice when he uttered Kellerman's name. If she'd been in any doubt, she now knows he'd been the one who fired the shot that saved her.
Given him a small, unsteady nod, she leans into the curve of Michael's arm - the feel of him against her is still faintly surreal - and glances around the van. She doesn’t recognise either of black-clad men sitting behind them. She’s almost afraid to ask the next question, but she has to know. “Lincoln? Jane?”
“Both on their way back to the safe house by now, I hope,” Michael murmurs against her ear, and despite everything else happening around them, the brush of his lips against her skin makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. “Jane has to meet a contact there.” He pulls away, just enough to let him study her face with an intensity that does nothing to help her catch her breath. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine." She shakes her head at his matter-of-fact words, her eyes blurring hotly, then she thumps his chest with her fists. “Damn you, Michael!” She glares at him, uncaring that they have an audience, too furious and relieved to worry about making a scene. Delayed shock, intones the prim little voice in her head for the second time that day. Once again, she dismisses it. She's too busy staring at the man holding her, the man she was so afraid she'd never see again. He's still wearing clothes he was wearing this morning, but there's a deep cut on his temple, dried blood darkening his left eyebrow, and a new darkness in his eyes that makes her heart twist. She desperately wants him to tell her everything that's happened to him since he pushed her into the back of that taxi, but it's easier - safer - to give to cling to her anger. “I’ve spent the last four hours not knowing if you were dead or alive!”
“I’m so sorry,” he whispers, catching her hands in his, holding them against his chest. She feels the pounding of his heart, strong and fast, and her anger begins to fade, dissolving in the face of her joy at being able to touch him, reassure herself that he’s really there. “I had no way to contact you, and the last hour has been a little rushed.”
“But why aren’t you at the apartment? What are you doing here?” she whispers back fiercely. “This was too big a risk even for you to take!”
His eyes grow darker. “I told you that you wouldn’t have to do this alone.” His hands tighten around hers. “I meant it.”
Before she can speak - or at least try to speak, because her voice seems to have vanished - he touches her hair, running his fingers through her newly fashioned bob, his eyes lighting up with a slow smile that makes her toes curl. “Nice.”
A ridiculous rush of shyness assails her, and she feels her face grow warm. “Yeah, well, it worked almost as well as that baseball cap of yours did.” His arm tightens around her shoulders as he tries to pull her closer, but she’s not done interrogating him, not yet. Putting one hand flat on his chest, she stares at him. “How the hell did you get here, Michael?” She doesn’t bother trying to hide her disbelief. “The last thing I knew you and Lincoln were in the FBI’s custody.”
A wry smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “A lot can change in an hour.” The arm around her shoulders shifts, and she feels the brush of his fingertips on the newly-exposed nape of her neck. “Turns out my talent for these situations is a strong genetic trait,” he says quietly, his gaze flicking towards his father.
A soft chuckle rises up in her throat, and she feels faintly giddy with both relief and the reality of his touch, warm and delicate against her skin. Finally heeding their silent audience, she asks no more questions, knowing he will tell her everything he can as soon as he can. Resting her hand on his leg - there's a tear in the knee of his khaki trousers, she notes with a dull pang - she leans into the solid warmth of his body, finding comfort in the soothing heat of him. "What now?" she murmurs softly as she turns her head towards him, unwilling to share their conversation with the rest of the passengers.
She hears him sigh, then he pulls her closer, his hand tightening on the curve of her shoulder as he puts his lips to her ear. "We find out what your father died for, and we use it to take down the people who killed him."
Sara closes her eyes, the sudden lump in her throat swallowing up her words. Groping blindly for Michael's other hand, she tightly laces her fingers through his until his palm is warm against hers. "Thank you."
She feels the brush of his lips against her temple, the soft rush of his breath over her skin. "Thank you."
~*~
Fandom: Prison Break
Pairing: Sara Tancredi/Michael Scofield
Other Characters: Lincoln Burrows, Paul Kellerman, Aldo Burrows, Jane Phillips
Length: 10,643 words
Rating: PG-15 for some salty language. *g*
Summary: The words safe house conjure up a picture of a dark and fortified hideout, certainly not this plain but clean wooden house in the outer suburbs.Spoilers for Season One and Season Two. Pretty much AU from "Scan" onwards, it also uses events from the whole of Season Two. I think you could call this an AU with strong canon overtones - in other words, anything that you recognise from canon is not mine. Many thanks to sk56 for the beta and sarah_scribbles for the handholding. This story is part of a series, the rest of which you can find here.
Author's Note: I have made a few little edits on Chapter Eleven to fix one or two things I had basically forgotten to include. D'oh. Also? If it's been a while since you read Unexpected, you might want to take a moment to skim through that one. I'm just saying.
~*~
Sara sits and half-listens as her three travelling companions argue about rental cars and paper trails, staring out the window at the increasingly familiar landscape. She feels more nervous with every passing mile, because each one of those miles brings them closer to Washington, to their target, to what could be the beginning of the end. She twists her hands together in her lap, rubbing her damp palms down the front of her sweatpants, and tries not to think of just much is about to depend on her.
Michael has promised she won’t be alone when she attempts to retrieve her father’s last message, but she suspects he was only telling her what they both wanted to hear. They’re not going to be the ones calling the shots. She knows Michael’s father and Jane will do all they can to keep her safe, but her father died because of what he’d discovered in Washington. Thinking she’ll be able to just stroll into that teahouse and stroll out again would be very naïve, and she stopped being naïve the day Paul Kellerman shoved a gun in her face in the middle of a Chicago alley.
Michael gives her a reassuring smile every time their eyes meet, obviously hoping to make her feel more relaxed, but the gesture has the opposite effect. Almost twenty-four hours later and the memory of their illicit tryst in the bathroom - a public bathroom, for God’s sake - still has the power to make her blush right down to the soles of her feet.
She’s not quite sure when she became the type of woman who has sex in public places. Perhaps she always has been that woman, and it just took the right - or wrong - circumstances for her to realise it, or perhaps it just took the right man and the right amount of desperation. Staring at Michael’s familiar profile, she remembers her teasing words, that they’d have to ‘try this in a bed one day’. Despite her nervousness, the thought makes a hot ripple of hunger dance through the pit of her stomach.
Damn it.
She looks away, drawing in half a dozen long, slow breaths that - amazingly enough - manage to soothe her frayed nerves. She knows the enormity of what they’re about to do, and she knows she can’t afford to let herself be distracted by her feelings for Michael. But that’s easier said than done, she thinks bleakly, when those feelings seem to have coloured her every decision for the last three months.
When their train finally pulls into Union Station, Michael gets to his feet and slings his duffle bag over his shoulder. He glances at Lincoln, already waiting beside the exit, then at her. “You ready for this?”
In truth, she feels as though she’s about to throw up, but she’s long past the stage of feeling she has to save face in front of this man. Picking up her own bag, she shuffles sideways out of her seat, wincing as her leg muscles - too long in the one position - twinge in protest. “Can I say no?”
“I’m afraid not.” He smiles at her, and she feels the fleeting reassurance of his hand brushing against hers. “Maybe next time?"
The prospect of having to go through this a second time does nothing to lift her spirits. She briefly contemplates quipping that if he’s trying to make her feel better, he’s doing a terrible job, but that would only remind them both of everything they’ve done their best to leave behind. Forwards, not backwards, she tells herself sternly, then follows him to the train’s automatic exit doors.
Lincoln leads the way as they step down from the carriage, Michael at his shoulder. Kellerman is a few steps behind her, and she’s glad. She can’t look at his face without feeling a sudden, raw surge of anger, let alone make small talk as they push their way through the crowd. Michael’s heated touch may have chased away a small measure of the chill from her bones, but she already knows that nothing is ever going to make her forget those two hours alone with Paul Kellerman.
They’re halfway across the main floor of the station when she sees Lincoln and Michael exchange a silent look and a nod - not for the first time, she can’t help envying their ability to communicate without a single word - then Lincoln turns to speak to Kellerman over her shoulder. “Right, let's go -” he starts to say, but his words fade away, his gaze narrowing. “Where the fuck is he?”
Michael turns at the same time she does, and it only takes a few seconds for both of them to realise that Paul Kellerman is nowhere to be seen. Her heart sinks.
“He was standing right behind you!” Lincoln spits out in furious disbelief. By contrast, his brother sounds almost too calm.
“He’s gone.” Michael’s voice is hollow as he turns to scan the crowd behind them, the blood instantly draining from his face. Sara follows the line of his gaze, sucking in a sharp breath at the sight of the uniformed police officers converging on the train. Oh, God. No, no, no.
Lincoln is staring in the same direction, looking just as stricken as she feels. “The bastard set us up.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Michael grabs her hand and squeezes it, then nods at his brother. “Either way, we gotta go.”
They start to walk quickly, pushing their way through the crowd. Lincoln takes the lead, literally shouldering people out of his way. Michael is holding her hand so tightly that her fingers start to tingle, but she doesn’t care. Bruised fingers are nothing compared to the thought of letting go.
Sara’s never suffered from anything remotely resembling agoraphobia, but today she knows how it feels to be afraid of the crush of strangers’ bodies. She meets no one’s eyes as they shove their way through the crowd, but she can still feel them looking at her. Knowing her. Only the tight clasp of Michael’s hand keeps her anchored, centred, and it’s a relief when they reach street level, the clear Washington sky above their heads, cool air filling her lungs.
It’s a fleeting respite. She once again follows the line of Michael’s anguished gaze, and the bottom falls out of her stomach. She tears her eyes away from the flashing blue lights in the distance, throwing a beseeching glance at Michael. “What do we do now?” she asks, her voice choked with fear. Michael looks at her and his brother in turn, then over her shoulder towards the traffic. His gaze narrows, and she can literally see his mind racing, the cool calculation beneath the surface panic.
“Sara?” She looks at him expectantly, waiting for him to tell her that they need to run. He doesn’t. He takes her hand in his, and presses something into her palm. “Take this,” he mutters, not quite meeting her eyes. “Get in the taxi behind you and go straight to that address. Linc and I will get there when we can.”
Mute with shock, she stares down at her hand - he’s given her a wad of cash and the scrap of envelope with Jane’s address - and shakes her head, unable to believe what she’s just heard. He can’t possibly be sending her away. “I’m not leaving you,” she finally manages to choke out the words through lips that feel frozen and stiff.
“We’ve got no choice,” he insists urgently, pulling his duffle bag off his shoulder as he speaks. A few seconds later the strap is hooked over her shoulder and he’s staring into her eyes with an intensity that almost makes her want to take a step backwards. “One of us has to get to that address and you’ve got a better chance than me or Lincoln. And whatever your father left, he left it for you.”
He takes her by the shoulders, his finger digging into flesh and bone, his gaze burning into hers. “I love you.” She stares at him, shock once again stealing her voice, barely aware of the urgent press of his fingertips against her skin as he spins her around and pushes her away from him. “You have to go. Now.”
“Michael!” She almost trips over her own feet as she tries to turn around, to go back to him, but he’s already moving away from her, his eyes silently pleading with her to go, to leave him. The bag over her shoulder is heavy, thumping against her hip as she takes one step, then another, then another. Still not quite believing this is happening, she pulls open the rear passenger door of the waiting taxi and clambers inside, awkwardly pulling Michael’s bag into her lap as she sinks onto the backseat.
The driver barely lifts his head. “Where to?”
“Uh-” Sara stares down at the piece of paper in her hand, rattling off the Dupont Circle address Jane had given Michael, then adds a breathless, “Please hurry.” Her frantic gaze seeks and finds Michael’s through the car window. He’s staring at her as though he’s afraid he’s never going to see her again, and she’s suddenly afraid he’s right.
The young driver grunts an acknowledgement - whether it’s of the address or her plea for him to hurry, she’ll never know - then the lights change and they’re moving. She tries to keep Michael in view but Lincoln grabs his arm, pulling him back into the crowd, and they’re lost to her sight.
“Visiting from out of town?”
She flinches at the sound of the driver’s voice. “What?”
“Are you from out of town?” he repeats with a decided air of impatience, and she gives herself a mental shake.
Normal. Be normal. “Yes,” she says, surprised that she can sound so casual when her heart feels as though it’s pounding divots in her ribcage. “I’m visiting a friend for a few days.”
“Cool.” With that succinct observation, he turns up the volume on the car stereo - thankfully he’s listening to a CD, rather than the radio - and she can’t quite believe she’s managed to find a cab driver who doesn’t want to chat.
Sara sits back in her seat, doing her best to look like an ordinary passenger on an ordinary trip on an ordinary day. She knows she has no choice but to keep going, but it’s all she can do not to tell the driver to turn the car around. She still can’t believe that she’s alone again, that Michael forced her to leave them, and yet there’s a part of her that’s not surprised at all. He’d wanted her to reach the evidence that could exonerate Lincoln, but he’d also wanted to keep her from registering on the authorities’ collective radar. She’d be lying if she said she didn’t understand why he did what he did.
She looks down at the duffle bag in her lap, then the scrawled note in her hand, and her eyes begin to burn at the sight of Michael’s handwriting. She understands, she thinks darkly, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t furious, and she’s glad, because being angry is better than being afraid. Afraid for herself, for Michael, for Lincoln, afraid that her father may have died for nothing. If she’s angry, maybe she won’t let herself think of how easy it would be to tell the driver to take a quick detour via the closest bar, how easy it would be to dull the edges of her fear.
She presses her tongue hard against the back of her teeth, determinedly pushing away the insidious lure of blissful oblivion, and blinks away the damp prickling behind her eyes. She stares at the traffic around the taxi, studying faces and vehicles, her heart still beating fast. She feels almost foolish for expecting the worst, but quickly reminds herself that the line between caution and paranoia was blurred a long time ago. If Paul Kellerman is once again playing this hideous game as a free agent, it’s not only the Washington Police Department she’s running from.
It takes fifteen minutes to reach the address on the torn piece of paper, and each one of those minutes is filled with a dread so cloying she feels as though she can’t breathe. When the taxi turns into the street where Jane has apparently secured yet another safe house, Sara scans the street numbers with relief. She has no reason to believe that her driver is anything but what he appears to be, but she’s not prepared to take any chances. Once they’re within easy walking distance of the street number she needs, she leans forward in her seat. “Just drop me off here, thank you.”
He tells her the fare and she hands him far too much money, forcing a smile as she tells him to keep the change. His eyes widen, then he bobs his head and grins. “Have a nice day.”
I doubt it, she thinks but of course doesn’t say. Her stomach is churning as she climbs out of the car, dragging the heavy duffle behind her. Slinging it over one shoulder, she hitches her handbag over the other, then slams the taxi door shut. She walks slowly along the wrong side of the street, watching as the driver pulls away and eventually turns left at the end of the street. Taking a deep breath, she crosses the street quickly, trying to look everywhere at once, feeling as though the eyes of the whole damned world are on her.
She’s less than five feet away from her destination when she stops in her tracks, staring at the man standing outside the front door of the small apartment complex, her breath catching in her throat. He suddenly turns, letting her see his face, and her stride falters. It’s not Michael or Lincoln or even their father, but a completely unfamiliar dark-haired man in his twenties. Her hand tightens around the strap of Michael’s bag, her feet literally itching with the impulse to flee, then the man nods at her. “Ms. Tancredi.”
It’s not a question. Sara blinks, too taken aback not to answer. “Yes.”
“Ms. Phillips is expecting you.” He beckons her closer, waving her into the foyer of the building. “Apartment number eight, top floor,” he tells her as she passes, and she finds herself stammering a thank you. As she presses the button to call the elevator, a faint flicker of hope rises up inside her. Maybe Michael and Lincoln were able to outmanoeuvre the police after she’d left them. Maybe they’ve actually beaten her here and are waiting upstairs, and in a few minutes she will be able to tell Michael to his face exactly what she thinks of his diversionary tactics.
The elevator only has three floors to travel, but it seems to take an eternity. She leans against the wall and stares at her reflection in mirrored tiles opposite, noting without surprise that she looks as nervous as she feels. A few seconds after her hesitant knock on the apartment door, she finds herself staring at Jane. “Are they here?” she asks without preamble, knowing that Jane won’t give a damn about non-observance of etiquette.
The other woman shakes her head. “No.”
Oh, God. It seems impossible that one word could sting so much, but it does and she feels as though someone’s shoved a knife in her belly. She leans against the door frame, Michael’s bag dangling from her hand. Without a word, Jane picks up the discarded bag, takes her by the elbow and draws her into the apartment, shutting the door firmly behind them.
“Tell me what happened,” she says with a calm Sara would envy if she could think of anything else but the fact that Michael and Lincoln are not here.
“We got to Union Station and suddenly police cars were everywhere,” Sara mutters unsteadily, her hand groping for the chair that’s magically materialised in front of her.
Jane nods unhappily. “We picked up a call to the local 911 five minutes before your train was due at Union Station.”
Sara grimaces. “Our train was a few minutes early, I think.”
Jane’s gaze locks with hers. “And the police were waiting for you.” Sara nods, and Janes lifts her hands in an uncharacteristic gesture of defeat. “I tried to contact Lincoln as soon as we picked up the 911 call, but he didn’t answer.” Her jaw tightens. “His phone has since been switched off.”
Sara closes her eyes in despair. She doesn’t remember Lincoln’s cell phone ringing while she was still with them. If it had rung after Michael had pushed her into that taxi, they would have answered Jane’s call, even if they’d been running for their lives. The fact that they hadn’t - or couldn’t - has a tight knot of dread sinking to the pit of her stomach.
“Michael gave me this address and pushed me into a taxi.” She drops into the chair, her handbag sliding off her shoulder to the floor. “He said we needed to split up and that I had a better chance of avoiding capture.”
“He was right.” Jane says briskly as she walks out of the room, returning half a moment later with a glass of water that she presses into Sara’s hands. “You weren’t followed?”
Sara hesitates. She’d done her best to watch her back, but the traffic had been heavy and she’d been in no state for noticing minute details. “Not as far as I’m aware, but I can’t be absolutely certain, no.” She stares down at the glass in her hands. “Was it Kellerman who called the police?”
Jane leans against a long antique bureau, her arms folded across her chest. “We’re not sure.”
“He vanished as soon as we stepped off the train,” Sara tells her, and the bitterness in her voice surprises even her.
Jane frowns. “I doubt he’s very far away.”
Sara takes a sip of water, more for something to do than anything else. “What makes you think he didn’t just cut and run?”
“Because that’s not his style,” Jane replies flatly, and not for the first time, Sara wonders how well she knows Paul Kellerman. “I suspect he anticipated you would try to shut him out of the retrieval operation, and took the opportunity afforded by the appearance of the police to pick up his own agenda once more.”
Swallowing the urge to remind Jane that shutting Kellerman out had been her idea, Sara nods. “So, now what?”
“Are you hungry? There’s food in the refrigerator.”
Sara shakes her head. She knows she should eat something, but her stomach still feels as though it’s filled with broken glass. “No, thanks.”
Jane uncrosses her arms, pushing herself away from the wooden bureau. “Aldo is pulling every string possible to ascertain Michael and Lincoln’s current status. I’m expecting a call from him any moment.” Her disconcertingly forthright gaze flicks over Sara, but not unkindly so. “While we’re waiting, perhaps you’d like to freshen up?”
Sara hesitates. All she wants to do is find out if Michael and Lincoln are safe. Quite frankly, she couldn’t care less about the state of her hair or her clothes. But she has to admit that Jane has a point. A shower and a change of clothes might help her feel like less of a refugee. “Fine.” Aware she sounds less than gracious, she adds a hasty, "Thank you."
Jane points her in the direction of both the bathroom and an airy bedroom, and Sara finds herself staring longingly at the bed, suddenly so weary that it almost feels as though her bones are crumbling away. One day soon, she promises herself, she is going to sleep for twelve hours straight in a real bed. Maybe even sixteen hours.
Before that particular train of thought can follow the painfully obvious path to the man responsible for her being in this room without him, she puffs out a loud sigh and swings both bags onto the bed. When she catches sight of the bills clumsily stashed in the zippered side compartment of her purse, her eyes widen. The last thirty minutes have been such a blur, she scarcely remembers the trip, let alone what she did with Kellerman’s money after she’d paid the taxi driver.
She pulls the wad of money out of the side pocket, and with it come the two slightly battered paper cranes Michael had retrieved from Kellerman in Gila. Her throat tightens at the sight of them, remembering how solemnly he’d returned them to her, the unspoken promises they represented. Carefully putting them to one side - one day she’ll have the damned things bronzed and put on her mantle, she decides with an unexpected flash of humour - she reaches into her handbag for her wallet, intent on putting the cash in a more secure place. Her hand brushes against something very unfamiliar, and she frowns.
Pulling it out of her bag, she stares at the GPS unit Michael had bought from the Target in Springfield. “What the hell?” Turning on her heel, she picks up her handbag and heads straight back to the main living room and to Jane.
The other woman eyes the unit with interest. “Yours?”
“No, and I have no idea why it’s in my handbag -” Sara breaks off, her thoughts furiously backtracking over the last few days, images and words flashing through her head. “He swapped them,” she blurts out loudly, her hand tightening around the GPS as though it’s her last link to Michael and maybe it is.
Jane frowns. “Who?”
“Michael. He swapped them,” she says again, her words tripping over themselves in her haste to explain. “A few days ago, Michael put a tracker in my purse.” She scrabbles through the contents of her handbag, then gives up and tips everything out onto the coffee table and begins to frantically sort through lip balm and dental floss and pens and tampons and antiseptic hand wash. There’s nothing else in her bag that doesn’t belong to her, she realises, and feels a sudden flicker of hope. “So if I have this-”
“Then Michael should have the tracker on him,” Jane finishes the thought for her.
“Yes.” Sara feels a sudden burst of hope, but it’s just as quickly swamped by a wave of frustration. “But if they’re already in custody, what good will it do us?”
Jane takes the unit from her hand, a rare smile touching her lips. “You’d be surprised.” She picks up a wireless earpiece from the table and hooks it over her ear. “We’ve snatched Lincoln from the police once before. I dare say we could manage it a second time.”
Sara watches Jane as she activates the GPS unit with a few casual keystrokes, then suddenly remembers something else. "Michael's police scanner should be in his bag too, if you need it?"
Another rare smile from Jane. "Thanks, but our people in the field are already fully equipped." With that, she lifts her hand to touch her wireless earpiece. “I need to make a few calls,” she offers with a faint air of apology. “You have time to take that shower, if you wish.”
Sara frowns. She doesn’t want to waste time showering, not now that there’s a chance of finding Michael and Lincoln. She wants to sit beside Jane and stare at the display screen of the GPS, watching the flashing coordinates that will translate into Michael and Lincoln’s position. She wants to listen to Jane’s one-sided conversations with Aldo Burrows and tell herself that he’ll be able to find his sons before the Company does. She wants to visit the place her mother loved best and take the first step towards ending this nightmare. “How soon can we -?”
Jane holds up one hand, then begins to speak to a third party via her earpiece. “The daughter is with me and we have the means to locate the other parties. Call me.” Disconnecting, she shakes her head. “Voicemail,” she mutters with unmistakable loathing, then glances at Sara. “I’m waiting for confirmation on the arrangements for your visit to the teahouse.” She pulls off the wireless earpiece, gently rubbing the top of her ear with a rueful smile. “Our profiler believes if your father did leave something for you, he would have made sure that you, and only you, would be the one to retrieve it.”
“That’s what Michael said, too.” She doesn’t stumble over his name, and she’s glad. She has the feeling that Jane Phillips already knows far too much about her feelings for Michael Scofield.
“The four of you spent almost two days in each other’s company.” The other woman gives her a searching look. “And you didn’t discuss your real destination within earshot of Paul Kellerman?”
Sara returns her gaze steadily. “No.”
“You’re certain?”
Sara hesitates. “I can’t be certain,” she admits reluctantly, “not when it comes to him.”
She and Jane share an unexpected glance of perfect understanding, then Jane nods towards the bathroom. “Please, feel free to use whatever you need.”
Knowing a dismissal - however polite - when she hears one, Sara doesn’t bother arguing. “Thank you.”
Returning to the bedroom, she rummages through Michael’s duffle bag to retrieve her toothbrush and a set of clean clothes. She still can’t believe he managed to correctly guess her bra size - she doubts any of his Loyola professors could have ever dreamed he’d use his college degree for such a practical application. She closes her eyes, letting herself remember his hands cupping her breasts with gentle reverence, his long fingers stroking and teasing, then she shakes her head, pushing the memory away. She can’t do this, not now.
Once installed in the bathroom, she shuts the door firmly behind her and does her best to put Michael out of her head. She pulls her hooded sweatshirt over her head, and her best suddenly isn’t good enough. She catches a faint hint of lemon soap and something else that sends a flurry of butterflies arching through her belly - God, she can still smell him, them, on her clothes.
She wants very much to bury her face in her shirt, inhale the scent of him until it chases away the memory of his face as he watched her leave him, but she doesn’t. She feels brittle and breakable, wound too tight, and she knows that wallowing in everything that’s happened between them will only serve to make her feel worse.
She takes a deep breath and puts the shirt aside, quickly stripping off the rest of her clothes, rolling them into a neat bundle. Perhaps she should simply throw them away, but she’s strangely reluctant to dispose of them. She has only a vague memory of thanking Michael for buying them for her. When she sees him, she promises herself, she will thank him again. As soon as she’s finished telling him exactly what she thinks of his last minute diversionary tactics, she thinks for the second time in an hour. Right now, though, she’ll shower and she’ll change and if she doesn’t let herself think too much about the events of the last week, she’ll be okay.
After liberating a tube of delicately scented and extremely overpriced face cleanser from the well-stocked bathroom cabinet (something that makes quite a change from the other safe houses she’s found herself in over the last week, she thinks dryly) then turns around, intent on having the hottest shower in living memory. When her gaze falls on the oversized white bathtub nestled beside the shower, she’s suddenly somewhere else, with someone else. Her chest feels tight and cold, her lungs constricted and aching with the panicked need to breathe, and she realises too late that she is far from okay.
Gripping the edge of the sink with both hands, she closes her eyes, remember the feel of wet hair clinging to her face, the almost antiseptic smell of soap and clean towels. Her mouth dries, her hands white-knuckled on the sink, the smell of burning flesh - it’s not real, it can’t be - suddenly thick in her nose and her throat. She remembers cold water pouring into her ears, the feel of the metal chain pressed hard against her teeth.
She remembers knowing she was about to die.
Oh, God. She feels sick, ripples of heat and cold fluttering across her skin. She’d thought she was stronger than this, that she’d managed to put it behind her, burned off the fear with her anger. She’d been wrong.
This has happened before, in Gila, and she’d ended up huddled at the bottom of an ancient shower stall, trying to drown out both the world and the thoughts inside her head. That time, Michael had been there to pull her through to the other side. But Michael isn’t here now, and although she knows Jane is only in the next room, Sara has never felt more alone in her life.
She sucks in several long breaths, desperately trying to pull herself together, keep herself together. Opening her eyes, she stares at her reflection for a long moment, and then she feels a sudden surge of anger. These people have already taken so much from her. She can’t - won’t - let them take anything else.
Narrowing her eyes at the pristine white tub, she turns her back on it, pulling open the glass shower door with an abrupt jerk. She stands underneath the hot water for a long time, unable to stop her furious tears, tears that dissolve in the steam and the heat as she lets herself weep for everything she’s lost and everything she still has to lose. By the time she twists the faucets off, she feels as hollow as a drum, stretched too tight, but her eyes are dry. That’s enough, she tells herself fiercely, and for the first time, she believes it. For the first time, she knows she can and will do whatever it takes in order to end this nightmare.
With Jane’s concerned questions about Kellerman echoing in her thoughts, she wraps a clean towel around herself, crosses the room and opens the bathroom cabinet to stare at the small cardboard boxes she’d noticed earlier. She grimly studies the forced smiles of the model on the front of each box for a moment, eventually selecting a dark-haired girl who looks as though she couldn’t be a day over seventeen. A quick search through the vanity drawers unearth a pair of dressmaking scissors, old but sharp enough for the task. She looks at herself in the mirror, takes a deep breath, and curls her fingers through the cold metal handle of the scissors.
Forty minutes later, a woman she barely recognises stares back at her, a woman with dark brown hair that skims her jaw. She can’t remember the last time her hair was this short. Second year of college, she thinks, suddenly remembering she’d dyed it over a small bathroom sink on that occasion as well. She reaches up a tentative hand, running her fingers through the tousled ends of her shaggy bob, then dresses quickly - despite the darkness of her mood, she marvels once again at Michael’s uncanny eye for scale - before going in search of Jane.
She finds her ensconced in the small study at the end of the hall, this time with a cell phone presses to her ear. “I’ll call you back,” Jane murmurs into the phone, then looks at Sara. To her relief, the other woman asks no questions, merely raising one eyebrow in approval. “That colour suits you.”
Sara shrugs with faint embarrassment. “Thanks.” Under different circumstances, she might have loved the new look, but it’s hard to find pleasure in a change that’s literally been made to help keep her alive.
Jane tilts her head to one side, still studying her, then she nods. “Very different look for you."
“That was the idea, I guess.” Sara manages a smile. “Should I be worried that you had a selection of hair dyes in the bathroom cupboard?"
Jane shrugs. “Part of being prepared for anything.”
Just like Michael, Sara thinks, and wishes she hadn’t, because the thought of Michael makes her feel as though someone has dug into her chest and scooped everything out. In an effort to distract herself, she gestures towards the phone in Jane’s hand. “Anything?”
“I spoke to Aldo while you were in the shower.”
Sara’s mouth dries. “And?”
“He’s fairly confident his team will be able to retrieve Michael and Lincoln.”
Sara doesn’t want to zero in on the one worrying word in that sentence, but she can’t help it. “Fairly confident?”
“There’s always room for doubt, unfortunately,” Janes says quietly, then the shrill peal of her cell phone signals the end of their conversation. “Give me a minute, will you? We can’t move until we get the final word from our contact. Could be five minutes, could be an hour.” She nods in the direction of the kitchen. “You should try to eat something.”
Once again dismissed - once again, not unkindly - Sara turns on her heel and walks away, gripped by a frustration that makes her want to slam doors very loudly. If she was out there, actually doing something instead of absolutely nothing, she might not feel quite so useless. However, because she is twenty-nine and not fourteen, Sara slams no doors but instead takes up the suggestion of food, making her way to the kitchen.
Ten minutes later, she's made herself a peanut butter sandwich and a cup of coffee, but it’s hard to drum up any enthusiasm for either of them. The sandwich is the first real food - Twinkies will never count as food as far as she’s concerned - she’s had in days, and it should taste a lot better than it does. Perhaps if her stomach wasn’t tied up in tight little knots, she would appreciate it more. But how can she when she’s sitting here in comfort and Michael and Lincoln could be anywhere? They could be dead, the insidious voice in her head whispers, and she closes her eyes in despair. Pushing aside her half-empty coffee cup, she drops her head into her hands, trying and failing not of her father and Michael and Lincoln and the still tender marks around her wrists. Damn it. She feels the familiar burn of angry tears stinging her eyes, the raw grief that hollows out her chest, and she wants it to stop.
Afterwards, she doesn’t try to blame the waiting, or the utter feeling of helplessness. Afterwards, she will realise that she was testing herself, wanting to know how tenuous her grip on her control actually was. Because if she had the strength to do this one thing, she would have the strength for everything else. Afterwards, she'll realise a lot of things, but right now, all she knows is that she's staring at the half-bottle of scotch she’d stumbled across when searching the cupboards for the peanut butter.
She stares at the bottle for what feels like a long time. She doesn’t pour herself a shot. She doesn’t put it back in the cupboard, but she doesn’t pour herself a shot. It’s a small victory, but a victory nevertheless, and she learned long ago to find the positive in any situation.
“You don’t want to do that,” Jane says casually from the doorway.
Sara flicks one fingernail against the peeling corner of the label on the bottle, and she wonders if it’s Jane or Aldo who has the nervous label-peeling tic. “I do, actually.” Perhaps she should be surprised that this woman knows she’s a recovering addict, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that no one’s secrets are safe. “But I won’t.” She looks up at Jane. “And that’s the important thing.”
Jane nods but says nothing, waiting. Letting out her breath, Sara gets to her feet, picks up the bottle and walks across the kitchen to the sink. Turning, she catches Jane's eye, feeling the need to be polite, even though she doubts Jane would feel much attachment to an old bottle of cheap scotch. "May I?" When the other woman nods, Sara unscrews the cap and pours the scotch away, every last drop. The familiar scent of it makes her nose twitch and her stomach clench, but she suddenly feels lighter, as though she’s slipped out of her old skin.
Jane raises one dark blonde eyebrow. “Surely maintaining sobriety is more a matter of self-control rather than simply ridding one’s self of temptation?”
Sara suppresses the old flicker of resentment, the familiar urge to insist that she knows best when it comes to her own demons. She can’t help wondering if Jane is this direct and no-nonsense with everyone. If so, it’s no wonder Lincoln entrusted LJ to her care.
"Quite right." Tossing the empty bottle in the trash, she turns to regard Jane calmly. “But better safe than sorry. Any news?”
A quiet admiration gleams briefly in Jane’s blue eyes, then she nods briskly. “We have a lock on their current position.”
Sara stares at her. “Are they in police custody?”
“No.”
Sara’s heart lurches. “They’re free?”
“No.” Jane looks at her steadily. “It appears that they weren’t actually taken into custody by the Washington police.”
Sara frowns, shaking her head as she walks back to the chair she’d just vacated. “But the police cruisers were almost on top of us, I saw them!” She doesn’t want to ask the next question, but she has to know. “The Company?”
Jane shakes her head. “FBI.”
Sara is very glad she’s sitting down. Putting her elbows on her knees, she bows her head as the blood seems to swirl away through her body, her hands and feet starting to tingle coldly. Mild shock, the practical part of her brain informs her, but it doesn’t make her feel any less wretched.
She feels Jane’s hand on her shoulder. “This isn’t necessarily bad news, Sara.”
The unfamiliar gentleness in the other woman’s voice does nothing to reassure her. “How can you say that?”
“Because their father and I still have a few very influential friends in the FBI.”
Sara looks up at her, startled. “What are you saying? Are they in FBI custody, or are they not?”
“Aldo is working on that now,” she announces calmly, then lifts her hand from Sara’s shoulder, her tone once again brisk and efficient. “In the meantime, you and I have somewhere to be.”
Remembering Michael’s reassuring words - you won’t be alone, I promise you that - Sara shoots Jane a concerned glance. “Just the two of us?”
The other woman slips one arm through a shoulder holster - pistol gleaming silver against the white of her shirt, then fastens the buckle with practiced fingers. She gives Sara a wry smile that warms her normally cool expression. “You’ll have all the backup you need.” Picking up the jacket she’d earlier draped over the back of the kitchen chair, she looks at Sara expectantly. “Are you ready for this?”
Sara takes a deep breath. She’s no less nervous than she was when Michael asked this very same question as their train pulled into Union Station, but this time she doesn’t hesitate. “Let’s go.”
~*~
Despite being huddled behind the tinted windows of a large SUV driven by an obviously armed-to-the-teeth man with a shaved head and a neck as thick as her right thigh, Sara’s second ride through the streets of Washington is no less nerve-wracking than her first. There’s a second man - operative, she corrects herself - in the front passenger seat, scanning their surroundings in silence, his eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. It had taken a moment for Sara to realise it was the man who’d first greeted her at the front door of Jane’s apartment building. The two men are very different in appearance, and Sara can’t help wondering if their roles within Jane’s team are just as diverse.
It’s hard to feel threatened in such company, but now there is nothing to distract her from the knowledge that Michael and Lincoln’s safety is still anything but secured. Knowing it will do no good to let the fear grab hold of her, drag her down until she can’t think straight, she takes several deep breaths and forces herself to focus on the sound of Jane’s voice.
“The manager’s name is Lois Hui.” Beside her, Jane seems to be doing a dozen things at once - scrolling through a PDA, making call after call on her cell phone, issuing directions to the man behind the wheel - but her manner is as unhurried and cool as always. “She’s been the owner of the business since 1975. Widowed since 1982. Two adult children, five grandchildren.” Her gaze meets Sara’s. “We’re working on the assumption your father would have made contact with her.”
“What if he didn’t?” Jane frowns, but Sara presses on undeterred. “Not to throw cold water on your assumptions, but my father wasn’t exactly the type of person to trust anyone outside his inner circle.”
“It appears your father knew quite well what he’d discovered could get him killed,” Jane points out gently. “Desperate people commit desperate acts, Sara. Sometimes they even put their trust in a stranger.”
The other woman’s tone is casual, but she doubts Jane says anything without first calculating the impact of her words. Swallowing hard, Sara turns her head to stare out through the tinted window. Jane is right, of course. It wasn’t only her father who had put his life in the hands of a stranger. Michael had done that almost every day inside the walls of Fox River. He had put his life in her hands the moment they’d met.
And now she was doing the very same thing, putting her life in the hands of a woman she barely knew. Running a distracted hand through her now-dry hair, she turns away from the window. “Why are you doing this?”
Jane blinks, obviously taken aback by the blunt question. “What do you mean?”
“I know why you’re going after The Company,” Sara says hastily. “But you’re looking after Lincoln’s son and now you’re looking after me.” Sara watches Jane’s face, hoping for a glimpse of an ordinary woman beneath the cool, professional exterior. “Both of which could possibly get you killed.”
“I was married once,” Jane says flatly, quickly, almost as though she wants the words out of her mouth and done with. “We had a child.”
It’s Sara’s turn to blink. She opens her mouth to ask where the husband and child are now, then realises she already knows the answer. Jane’s use of past tense and the sudden emptiness in her usually bright blue eyes makes it all too painfully clear. “The Company?”
Jane nods only once, an abrupt jerk of her head. “I was never able to prove it, of course.” She clears her throat, smoothes one hand down the perfectly smooth front of her dark jacket, long fingers straightening her already straight lapels, and Sara has the abrupt impression of someone pulling a cloak around themselves, hiding themselves from view.
Be careful what you wish for, she thinks unhappily. She had wanted to know more about this woman, why she would go to such lengths to protect someone else’s family, and now she wants nothing more than to forget what she’s just learned. "I'm sorry."
“It was a long time ago,” Jane tells her with an unmistakable air of finality, and Sara knows their conversation is over.
Silence sits between them until the SUV reaches the intersection that will take them through to the street where their target is located. “How is this going to work?” Sara’s voice sounds small and tight, even to her own ears.
“Hodges,” Jane nods to the man in the front passenger seat, “will check things out inside first, then watch the rear entrance of the teahouse.” Her gaze slides across to the man in the driver’s seat. “Pearce and I will look after things out front.”
Even toned down and in plain English, Jane's explanation of what's about to happen makes her shiver. Sara bites her bottom lip - an old habit she’d thought she’d banished years ago - in an effort to stop herself from telling Jane that she can’t do this alone. She knows that they will only have one chance to do this right, and this is the way it has to be done. “Okay.”
Jane gives her a reassuring smile. “You’ll be fine.”
“So you keep saying,” Sara mutters, wondering if it’s possible to feel any further away from ‘fine’ than she does at this moment. She doubts it. When the SUV pulls up a few doors down from their destination, she doubts it even more.
If she wasn’t so busy thinking of everything that might go wrong once she steps inside those doors, it would be quite interesting to watch her fellow travellers go through their final preparations. The ordinary wireless cell phone earpieces are exchanged for sleek black versions, their conversation peppered with terms she doesn’t understand and hopes she never does, the air of rapidly building anticipation. She watches from behind the tinted window as Hodges leaves them and walks swiftly to the entrance of the teahouse, suddenly looking like any other Washington inhabitant in search of an early lunch.
After a very long five minutes, Jane lifts her hand to her earpiece. “Yes?” She listens intently for a few seconds, then almost smiles. “Good.” She looks at Sara. “You’re good to go.”
Sara slowly unbuckles her seatbelt, then her hand finds her purse on the seat beside her. She and Jane had decided she needed to present as normal a front as possible, hence the casual clothes and handbag. Her stomach is churning coldly, but she thinks of her father, of the small paper birds in her purse, of promises and trust and love, and she opens the car door and steps out onto the pavement.
It’s been almost fifteen years since she last walked through this door. The space around her is filled with both cool and warm colours, the walls cluttered with an eclectic mix of artwork, the dark wooden tables arranged to give the illusion of privacy. The queue at the counter is six people deep, and she quickly scans the room, knowing she can’t afford to waste that much time. A black clad waitress, her hands laden with dirty china, is negotiating her way between two nearby tables, and Sara quickly seizes the opportunity.
“Excuse me, please. I’d like to speak to the manager?”
The waitress gives her a curious look, but nods. “Sure.” She gestures with her overburdened hands. “I’ll let her know as soon I ditch these.”
With nothing else to do but wait, Sara draws back into a quiet corner, gazing around the teahouse at the happily oblivious customers going about the simple business of eating and drinking. She inhales deeply, and the scent of fragrant tea and cut flowers instantly whisks her back in time. She remembers trailing her fingers along that wall there, the paint smooth beneath her fingertips. Her mother had taught her how to eat with chopsticks in that corner booth. She remembers hesitantly tasting slippery noodles and fragrant soup that had made the inside of her mouth come alive. She feels the phantom touch of her mother’s hand on hers, and her eyes blur with the unexpected threat of tears.
Focus.
“May I help you?”
Sara turns to find herself almost nose to nose with an extremely well preserved Eurasian woman. Smooth, unlined skin, short black hair cut in a blunt bob, her dark green eyes gleaming with curiosity. She remembers this woman, Sara realises with a start.
“Mrs Hui?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Sara,” she begins - she and Jane had decided to leave her last name out of any initial discussion - her gaze trained on the older woman’s face. “This is probably going to sound crazy, but I think you may have something here for me?”
The woman frowns. “What kind of something?” She glances towards the serving counter. “If you’ve placed a special order for tea leaves, Jacob will look after -”
“No, I’m not here to pick up an order.” Fighting the sudden urge to laugh - how can she not, this is beyond absurd - Sara takes a deep breath. “Actually, I’m hoping you have something my father may have left for me. An envelope, maybe?”
There is not the faintest hint of recognition on the woman’s face, and Sara’s heart sinks. “I’m sure you don’t remember me, but my mother and I used to come here often when I was a child.” The woman says nothing, and Sara begins to despair. “Please, I need your help. This is very important.”
Lois Hui studies her for a long moment, and Sara feel cold pinpricks of sweat start to dot her scalp. “If it is so important, why would your father entrust it to a stranger?”
“Because he couldn’t reach me to give it to me in person,” Sara tells her, the words as bitter as cloves on her tongue. Oh, Dad. “He left me a message before he died,” she says quietly, knowing there’s nothing to be gained from keeping anything back. Not now. “He told me to look in the place my mother loved best.”
Again the woman studies her, taking in Sara's face and hair, her bright green eyes hardly seeming to blink. “There was a man here last week,” she finally murmurs, as if she’s talking to herself. “He didn’t give me his name.” Her gaze meets Sara’s, then flicks away again. “He showed me a picture of his wife and his little girl. Told me how much they had loved coming here.”
Sara feels heat prick behind her eyes. She’d forgotten about the ancient photograph her father used to keep in his wallet. “That was my mother and me.” The woman’s gaze sweeps over her newly cropped and dyed hair, and Sara hastily adds, “My hair was red until a few hours ago.”
Lois Hui nods. “What did you say your name was?”
“Sara. Sara Tancredi.”
Once again, the older woman studies her, long enough for panic to start gnawing at her, long enough for her knees to start trembling. Finally, she smiles warmly. ‘I may be able to help you.”
Sara feels her whole body sag with relief. She lets out a shaky breath, sending up a silent prayer of thanks. “My dad left something with you?”
“That depends, my dear.”
Sara blinks. “On what?”
The older woman smiles. “Every good secret has a password, Miss Tancredi.”
Sara’s hands curl into tight, tense fists at her sides, her mind painfully blank. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what it could be.”
Lois Hui’s smile falters. “Then I’m afraid I cannot help you,” she insists gently, and Sara feels panic clutch at her chest.
What the hell had her father been thinking? Making her play Twenty Questions with a complete stranger? Making her come up with a secret password when they’d hardly had a civil conversation in the last ten years? It’s hard to believe that her father and Michael may have had something more than herself in common, and yet here she is, trying desperately to decipher her father's cryptic clue. “Please, I’m begging you. My father died for what he gave you.”
Indecision flickers in the other woman’s face, then she leans closer, as if to impart a secret of her own. “It’s a belief you have tried to follow your whole life.”
Sara closes her eyes, desperately trying to filter out the sounds of clinking cutlery and customers' voices, the complicated scent of hot food and perfume and tea, desperately flinging herself backwards through her life with her father. Part of her insists her father didn’t know her well enough to set such a challenge, but her heart knows it’s not as simple as that. She opens her mind a little more, snatching at every memory she can find, and suddenly finds her thoughts filling with a sterile white room, a heartbreakingly familiar voice casually reciting the words she’d treasured as long as she can remember.
Thank you, Michael. Opening her eyes, she meets Lois Hui’s gaze unflinchingly. “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
The older woman smiles. “You have your mother’s eyes.” Before Sara can respond, she touches her arm lightly, then nods. “Wait here, please.” She walks quickly past the front counter and vanishes into a small office, returning almost immediately with a small white envelope in her hand. “I saw his face on the news the other day,” she murmurs as she puts the envelope into Sara’s hand. “I am very sorry you have lost him.”
It takes a few seconds for her to find her voice, and even then her words sound breathless and fragile. “Thank you.”
The cell phone in her purse chooses that moment to ring. Nodding at Mrs Hui, Sara steps away from the counter and pulls the phone out of her bag, flipping it open with hands that are trembling with both relief and adrenaline. “Hello?”
As always, Jane sounds far more calm than Sara feels. “Any progress?”
She grins into the phone as she shoves the envelope into the depths of her purse. “I have it.”
“That’s very good, because we need to move. Now.”
Sara’s sense of accomplishment instantly vanishes. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ll explain later. Go out through the back entrance. Hodges will meet you there.”
Her heart suddenly pounding, Sara flips the phone shut and turns to the woman beside her. “Is there another way out of here?”
Mrs Hui doesn’t bat a proverbial eyelid at the question, and Sara vaguely wonders if anything surprises this woman. “Yes, through the kitchen. It leads into the alleyway.”
Sara gives her a grateful smile, taking a few seconds to reach out and grasp her hand. “Thank you so much.”
The young kitchen hands don’t spare her a second glance as she walks quickly through their domain, and it doesn’t take long for her to reach the back entrance. She pushes open the heavy door and steps into the alleyway, her nose wrinkling as she exchanges the pleasant atmosphere for the teahouse for the more earthy scents of trash and tar and dust. The door slams shut loudly behind her in the same instant Paul Kellerman points his gun at her. “I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly feeling the déjà vu here.”
Frozen, she stares first at Kellerman, then at Hodges, who is lying utterly still on the ground a few feet away. Oh, God, no.
Kellerman smiles. “I know, I know. So close and yet so far, right?”
Oddly enough, it’s the smile that banishes her fear and reignites her anger. “You called the police from the train.”
“Not guilty,” he tells her. “I believe that was the work of the teenaged stoners in the next carriage.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that, because in her mind he’d been guilty of so many things, it’s hard to accept that he’s innocent for once. “You expect me to believe that?”
He shrugs. “I figured that Team Scofield wasn’t going to keep me around too long. All I did was take the chance to slip away.”
“So you could follow me here,” she says flatly.
“Look, Sara, I’d love to stay and chat, but why don’t you just hand over the disk, and we can put this all behind us. You go your way, I’ll go mine.”
“Disk?” The small white envelope suddenly seems very heavy in her purse. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Kellerman smiles once more. “You never were a particularly good liar, Sara.”
She lifts her chin, her hand tightening on the strap of her purse. If this is how it ends, so be it, but she will not give him the satisfaction of yielding to him. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”
He takes a step towards her, then another, and she feels her skin start to crawl with fear. “Sara,” he begins, but a screech of tires drowns out the sound of her name from his lips, his eyes widening as he stares over her shoulder. The sudden roar of a gunshot makes her flinch and Kellerman’s arm jerk. His face turns white, pale against the dark pattern of blood flowering over his right shoulder.
“Sara!” Spinning around at the sound of her name, she stares at the unfamiliar black van, at Michael’s face as he flings open the back door for her, then at his outstretched hand. “Come on!”
Déjà vu, Kellerman had said. He’d been right.
This time, she doesn’t hesitate and she doesn’t look back. She rushes toward the van - there’s an unfamiliar car behind it, yet another SUV - and grabs Michael’s hand and letting him pull her into the back of the vehicle. The door slams behind her and the van roars away, and just like last time she doesn’t fall, because Michael is holding her tight, pulling her down onto the seat beside him. She fumbles in her purse, then thrusts the envelope into his hands, suddenly afraid of losing it, wasting it. “Here.”
She’s vaguely aware of Michael handing the envelope to his father in the front passenger seat - she hadn’t noticed anyone but Michael - then their hastily murmured conversation. It’s only when Michael touches her face that she realises she’s shaking violently, her heart pounding so hard she can barely speak. “Is he dead?” She licks her dry lips, trying to get the words out but everything seems disjointed and not making much sense at all. “Kellerman, I mean.”
“I don’t know.” He touches her face, his fingers sliding along the curve of her jaw, his eyes burning into hers, as though he can't believe she's this close to him. “Either way, he won’t be coming after us.”
“He shot Hodges,” she hears herself say, and this time Aldo Burrows is the one to answer her.
“I know," he mutters wearily, then jerks his head towards the back of the van. "The second team will take care of Hodges and Kellerman." It takes her a few seconds to realise two things; one, that he's referring to the SUV that had been behind them, and two, there was more than a hint of satisfaction in his voice when he uttered Kellerman's name. If she'd been in any doubt, she now knows he'd been the one who fired the shot that saved her.
Given him a small, unsteady nod, she leans into the curve of Michael's arm - the feel of him against her is still faintly surreal - and glances around the van. She doesn’t recognise either of black-clad men sitting behind them. She’s almost afraid to ask the next question, but she has to know. “Lincoln? Jane?”
“Both on their way back to the safe house by now, I hope,” Michael murmurs against her ear, and despite everything else happening around them, the brush of his lips against her skin makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. “Jane has to meet a contact there.” He pulls away, just enough to let him study her face with an intensity that does nothing to help her catch her breath. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine." She shakes her head at his matter-of-fact words, her eyes blurring hotly, then she thumps his chest with her fists. “Damn you, Michael!” She glares at him, uncaring that they have an audience, too furious and relieved to worry about making a scene. Delayed shock, intones the prim little voice in her head for the second time that day. Once again, she dismisses it. She's too busy staring at the man holding her, the man she was so afraid she'd never see again. He's still wearing clothes he was wearing this morning, but there's a deep cut on his temple, dried blood darkening his left eyebrow, and a new darkness in his eyes that makes her heart twist. She desperately wants him to tell her everything that's happened to him since he pushed her into the back of that taxi, but it's easier - safer - to give to cling to her anger. “I’ve spent the last four hours not knowing if you were dead or alive!”
“I’m so sorry,” he whispers, catching her hands in his, holding them against his chest. She feels the pounding of his heart, strong and fast, and her anger begins to fade, dissolving in the face of her joy at being able to touch him, reassure herself that he’s really there. “I had no way to contact you, and the last hour has been a little rushed.”
“But why aren’t you at the apartment? What are you doing here?” she whispers back fiercely. “This was too big a risk even for you to take!”
His eyes grow darker. “I told you that you wouldn’t have to do this alone.” His hands tighten around hers. “I meant it.”
Before she can speak - or at least try to speak, because her voice seems to have vanished - he touches her hair, running his fingers through her newly fashioned bob, his eyes lighting up with a slow smile that makes her toes curl. “Nice.”
A ridiculous rush of shyness assails her, and she feels her face grow warm. “Yeah, well, it worked almost as well as that baseball cap of yours did.” His arm tightens around her shoulders as he tries to pull her closer, but she’s not done interrogating him, not yet. Putting one hand flat on his chest, she stares at him. “How the hell did you get here, Michael?” She doesn’t bother trying to hide her disbelief. “The last thing I knew you and Lincoln were in the FBI’s custody.”
A wry smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “A lot can change in an hour.” The arm around her shoulders shifts, and she feels the brush of his fingertips on the newly-exposed nape of her neck. “Turns out my talent for these situations is a strong genetic trait,” he says quietly, his gaze flicking towards his father.
A soft chuckle rises up in her throat, and she feels faintly giddy with both relief and the reality of his touch, warm and delicate against her skin. Finally heeding their silent audience, she asks no more questions, knowing he will tell her everything he can as soon as he can. Resting her hand on his leg - there's a tear in the knee of his khaki trousers, she notes with a dull pang - she leans into the solid warmth of his body, finding comfort in the soothing heat of him. "What now?" she murmurs softly as she turns her head towards him, unwilling to share their conversation with the rest of the passengers.
She hears him sigh, then he pulls her closer, his hand tightening on the curve of her shoulder as he puts his lips to her ear. "We find out what your father died for, and we use it to take down the people who killed him."
Sara closes her eyes, the sudden lump in her throat swallowing up her words. Groping blindly for Michael's other hand, she tightly laces her fingers through his until his palm is warm against hers. "Thank you."
She feels the brush of his lips against her temple, the soft rush of his breath over her skin. "Thank you."
~*~