Seven 5/7: Anger
Characters: Michael, mentions of Sara, original characters.
Chapter: 5: Anger
Length: 2000 words
Genre: AU, drama, reflective, post-series, sadness.
Rating: pg-15 (language, adult concepts)
Summary: A lot can happen in four years...
A/N: This is the alternative POV chapter to wrldpossibility’s Seven. Thanks to co-writers, linzi20 and wrldpossibility, and to lauratnz for the beautiful banner. One piece of canon dialogue exchange used here (4:01)
Anger
I don’t know who to trust no surprise
(Everyone feels so far away from me)
Heavy thoughts sift through dust and the lies
(Trying not to break but I’m so tired of this deceit)
From the Inside by Linkin Park
Now
He cannot escape.
And the reality of this notion clings to his skin like the most virulent parasite, wanting to suck the very spirit and soul from his existence. Some days he almost lets it. Some days, Michael wants to surrender to the horror of his estrangement from Sara and close his eyes to the demands of his life and to the suffering of hers. Like yesterday, during a moment in time he could have sworn he heard a tinkle of a laugh, a bell of sexy sound emanating from a picture next to his bed - and her voice had been real. Very much her, tumbling from the stillness of a photograph and attempting to enliven his cadaverous thoughts.
It hadn’t.
He can’t escape. It’s not that he couldn’t if he tried hard enough, because the government bunker is an non-lockdown facility despite being covert. It’s the psychological manacles that burn his skin and shackle him as physically as any ever did in Fox River. At least he’d had family in prison. He met his wife, they spent time in the most convoluted courtship, he had his brother tucked away on death row, but they were close. They were snagged together by a bond of faith and blood shed via fraternal ties, or on floors and walls after a riot had started.
Here, he has nothing.
He has a deal penned in the amniotic fluid of his son and affixed to Sara’s forehead, as prominent and easily seen as a laser-light target on the front of a prison shirt. It’s there, and not a day goes by in his all-encompassing job where Michael forgets he gave birth to the role wrapping him in the government’s skirt while his wife and child go free. Liberated, safe, but as far away from him as death is from the pure pink of live skin.
He’s not Aldo. Sara and boy Michael are not real-time effigies of Christina, Lincoln and himself. It’s different. It has to be. For once, his fingers are clumsy, and he fumbles the miniature folds of the origami train he wants to chug to his son through the tunnel of his frustration.
36-72 hours after Sara’s arrest
Seeking out Paul Kellerman in the wake of their wedding party being crashed wasn’t easy, but Michael had learned a great deal about contacts and how to use them over the last months of mayhem. He sourced a prominent colleague of Bruce Bennett, and they built the fastest trail to Kellerman since the rogue sleazed into any of their lives.
It happened over a series of cellphone calls, in between petitioning the prison warden to see Sara, re-establishing ties with Mahone, and trying to get his head around his bride being taken from the happiness of hot sands to vampire-infested incarceration. His brain burnt with the enormity of what they faced.
Getting Kellerman onside was easier than Michael anticipated, but Paul couldn’t provide immediate answers, and Michael’s anger had surged until his head throbbed like an abused bass drum. ‘I will look into it straight away, Michael, but this goes way over my head. Way over. Obviously, it wasn’t even on my ‘to-do’ radar and the fact they’ve taken Sara to-’
‘SHE cannot do time! She’s inside, and she CANNOT be in there!’ Michael paused, placing his hand on his forehead to prevent him from crashing his pin-cushioned skull into the wall. It seared with pain and he knew a malignancy was back - in all forms. His tumour, the death-reach of his mother, the conspiracy that seemed intent to sever every single arm of his family. The cancer of his fucking life.
‘I said I will do all I can, Michael, it might take me a while. I know where to start, but I’m not sure exactly where that will lead. Until then, you need to be patient.’
‘She’s PREGNANT. She’s a target in there, Paul! She cannot be in there, AT ALL! Help me help her! This cannot happen!’
Michael had felt the fury ascend from his belly and shoot razors into his lungs and throat. He couldn’t breathe, the anger threatening to slice open his insides and allow the blackness of their history choke him, like drowning in a fucking tar pit. But he needed to think. He needed to reason, because the rage was swamping his thought-processes as potently as the tumour threatened his life.
In another existence, he was a patient man. He might have waited, but not with Sara facing the onslaught of all his demons. Not with his unborn child subjected to the rage of the prison machine, being born into a residence which housed the sins of the fathers.
But Michael’s child would see the sun of freedom and walk the sands of the unchained within maternal arms - even if Michael had to make a pact for their deliverance. ‘I can do their time. I have an idea, and if you’re willing to broach the deal with whoever the hell is doing this to my family, I can offer you my . . . my abilities.’
In actuality, his brain blustered like the innards of a hurricane. With the bombardment of calls to Kellerman, the passage of time since Sara’s was taken, and the imminent threat that he would implode with the velocity of his anger, Michael was forced to play his hand.
How much time are you looking at?
They're saying 15 years. I have to find out for sure.
And the pact was brokered quickly, once floated along the backwaters of the righteous rivers of conspiracy - through the canals of his country’s government. ‘My speciality - my ability to analyze. I can give you that time. I can help set up an Watchdog Intel service to keep check on the renegade members of the Company. We both know they still work covertly all over the world, Paul. I have basic information gleaned through Krantz, and it can be extended. I can offer that, and you know how I work, god damnit! All I need is the technology and a venue and I can set up a team. You know I can! Anything! Anything to get her out!’
‘They want five years, Michael. Same as your original Fox River sentence. You will be deep cover. Sara walks. She walks, with no record. If you break cover during that time, she’s back inside and you are declared a wanted man again.’
‘I know she’ll never agree to it. Sara won’t let me give time for her, and she will want to serve her own-’
‘That’s where you’ll have to work this out, Michael. If you think Sara won’t agree, then you’re going to have to plan something to facilitate her egress from prison and NOT look back. You got that? That’s your speciality! Well then do it! There’s no turning back, not if you want Sara free.’
Michael did. The shock was merely an illusion of a magician who was torn between exposing the dirtiest tricks of his trade to the one he loved most, and protecting her from the very real saw blades that would rip her in half if she continued to lay in the box of that prison. He hated himself for his deception. He ranted silently at the world - at fate - as the electric sarcophagus released her, but entombed him. The sparks of his ruse vaulted a throttle of anger, and singed the tears to his cheeks while Michael finally succumbed to the bigger pressure pulsing his brain.
Darkness.
Now
Michael hurls the files so they bounce off his desk and erupt like a storm against the cold floor of the bunker. He’s alone, except for the wandering gloom of his male and female directors, and they bring about as much light to his day as a gale-force wind to a dilapidated harbour. It’s summer outside and Michael is sweltering beneath his shirt, but the sheer magnitude of this afternoon’s wind threatens to unveil the most furious of Floridian storms. He regales in the mood of the tempest.
‘The deal said FIVE years! As long as my Fox River sentence! I’m over half-way through. Way over!’
The directors rarely lose their composure, but Michael has never blown-out and lashed like cyclonic winds before, and the couple suddenly appear buffeted. They react according to their personalities. ‘You were incapacitated for the first year of your deal, Mr. Scofield. You did not contribute to this role for over twelve months!’
She’s nastier. ‘You can’t expect to be rewarded for lying in a hospital bed like a vegetable! You are twelve months in arrears, thus you are not over half-way in the timeline.’
He wants to blast out and hit something. Michael flails adrift in memories of furious exchanges, as though this association with anger will help temper the tirade of emotion - his spats with Self, the fireball of aggression he shared with Christina, the pure flood of hate and atonement he experienced when he crushed Bagwell to the floor for the very last time.
Nothing equates to this feeling, because the current threat relates to his present. His future; Sara and his child. ‘I want to talk to someone else. This cannot happen. It’s NOT part of the deal! I want to speak to-’
‘Who?’ interrupts the female director. ‘Paul Kellerman, right? Why? Because he made the original deal?’ The woman walks over to the window, stares at the promise of rain and wrath, and thunders a laugh back at Michael. ‘Oh yeah. But he’s probably too busy taking photos of your wife for you, and pushing his political barrow to listen . . .’
‘What?’
‘Come on, Scofield! You know it’s been Kellerman keeping an eye on your family, in between jetting to Washington to lay a base for possible political action. How could you not know it? It was him this entire time!’
Maybe he did know, somewhere beneath the residual dusting of shock and guilt and denial. ‘I have never spoken to him in person. He texts me, he emails, he sends photographs. I could not have known-’
‘He called you on the phone once, he visited you in your pathetic crippled state! The point is, Scofield, Kellerman has made too many allowances for you in this deal, and we don’t intend to involve him to reduce your timeline. There’s only one way to secure the time you want and you know what that is!’
He knows what it is, and it’s near impossible to achieve, although Devon and the team have been working shifts around the clock over the past six months to try and capture General Krantz’s right-hand man. He’s hiding in the Eastern Europe and does not want to be found.
‘I want to speak to Kellerman,’ is all Michael says, and a fresh wind of anger storms his reason as he thinks of Sara being watched by Paul Kellerman and living alone for another year.
‘Not going to happen, Mr. Scofield,’ comes the voice of the head guy, but Michael doesn’t listen. He suddenly needs air.
***
The thunder and lightening rip the sky apart, and Michael enters the outdoor leisure area of the complex just as heaven unleashes violent tears. He sinks to his knees and hands, pummeling the earth in time with the beating of his heart, wishing the force of the rain and the wind would drown his agitation forever.
He pounds and releases. He heaves profanity to the sky and rages at the muddied earth. He bows his head and lets the scourge of the rain crack against the back of his skull.
When the furor passes, there's a moment of absolute quietude, and he pledges - it’s time to stop burning bridges and construct a new route home around the eye of the storm.
Chapter: 5: Anger
Length: 2000 words
Genre: AU, drama, reflective, post-series, sadness.
Rating: pg-15 (language, adult concepts)
Summary: A lot can happen in four years...
A/N: This is the alternative POV chapter to wrldpossibility’s Seven. Thanks to co-writers, linzi20 and wrldpossibility, and to lauratnz for the beautiful banner. One piece of canon dialogue exchange used here (4:01)
Anger
I don’t know who to trust no surprise
(Everyone feels so far away from me)
Heavy thoughts sift through dust and the lies
(Trying not to break but I’m so tired of this deceit)
From the Inside by Linkin Park
Now
He cannot escape.
And the reality of this notion clings to his skin like the most virulent parasite, wanting to suck the very spirit and soul from his existence. Some days he almost lets it. Some days, Michael wants to surrender to the horror of his estrangement from Sara and close his eyes to the demands of his life and to the suffering of hers. Like yesterday, during a moment in time he could have sworn he heard a tinkle of a laugh, a bell of sexy sound emanating from a picture next to his bed - and her voice had been real. Very much her, tumbling from the stillness of a photograph and attempting to enliven his cadaverous thoughts.
It hadn’t.
He can’t escape. It’s not that he couldn’t if he tried hard enough, because the government bunker is an non-lockdown facility despite being covert. It’s the psychological manacles that burn his skin and shackle him as physically as any ever did in Fox River. At least he’d had family in prison. He met his wife, they spent time in the most convoluted courtship, he had his brother tucked away on death row, but they were close. They were snagged together by a bond of faith and blood shed via fraternal ties, or on floors and walls after a riot had started.
Here, he has nothing.
He has a deal penned in the amniotic fluid of his son and affixed to Sara’s forehead, as prominent and easily seen as a laser-light target on the front of a prison shirt. It’s there, and not a day goes by in his all-encompassing job where Michael forgets he gave birth to the role wrapping him in the government’s skirt while his wife and child go free. Liberated, safe, but as far away from him as death is from the pure pink of live skin.
He’s not Aldo. Sara and boy Michael are not real-time effigies of Christina, Lincoln and himself. It’s different. It has to be. For once, his fingers are clumsy, and he fumbles the miniature folds of the origami train he wants to chug to his son through the tunnel of his frustration.
36-72 hours after Sara’s arrest
Seeking out Paul Kellerman in the wake of their wedding party being crashed wasn’t easy, but Michael had learned a great deal about contacts and how to use them over the last months of mayhem. He sourced a prominent colleague of Bruce Bennett, and they built the fastest trail to Kellerman since the rogue sleazed into any of their lives.
It happened over a series of cellphone calls, in between petitioning the prison warden to see Sara, re-establishing ties with Mahone, and trying to get his head around his bride being taken from the happiness of hot sands to vampire-infested incarceration. His brain burnt with the enormity of what they faced.
Getting Kellerman onside was easier than Michael anticipated, but Paul couldn’t provide immediate answers, and Michael’s anger had surged until his head throbbed like an abused bass drum. ‘I will look into it straight away, Michael, but this goes way over my head. Way over. Obviously, it wasn’t even on my ‘to-do’ radar and the fact they’ve taken Sara to-’
‘SHE cannot do time! She’s inside, and she CANNOT be in there!’ Michael paused, placing his hand on his forehead to prevent him from crashing his pin-cushioned skull into the wall. It seared with pain and he knew a malignancy was back - in all forms. His tumour, the death-reach of his mother, the conspiracy that seemed intent to sever every single arm of his family. The cancer of his fucking life.
‘I said I will do all I can, Michael, it might take me a while. I know where to start, but I’m not sure exactly where that will lead. Until then, you need to be patient.’
‘She’s PREGNANT. She’s a target in there, Paul! She cannot be in there, AT ALL! Help me help her! This cannot happen!’
Michael had felt the fury ascend from his belly and shoot razors into his lungs and throat. He couldn’t breathe, the anger threatening to slice open his insides and allow the blackness of their history choke him, like drowning in a fucking tar pit. But he needed to think. He needed to reason, because the rage was swamping his thought-processes as potently as the tumour threatened his life.
In another existence, he was a patient man. He might have waited, but not with Sara facing the onslaught of all his demons. Not with his unborn child subjected to the rage of the prison machine, being born into a residence which housed the sins of the fathers.
But Michael’s child would see the sun of freedom and walk the sands of the unchained within maternal arms - even if Michael had to make a pact for their deliverance. ‘I can do their time. I have an idea, and if you’re willing to broach the deal with whoever the hell is doing this to my family, I can offer you my . . . my abilities.’
In actuality, his brain blustered like the innards of a hurricane. With the bombardment of calls to Kellerman, the passage of time since Sara’s was taken, and the imminent threat that he would implode with the velocity of his anger, Michael was forced to play his hand.
How much time are you looking at?
They're saying 15 years. I have to find out for sure.
And the pact was brokered quickly, once floated along the backwaters of the righteous rivers of conspiracy - through the canals of his country’s government. ‘My speciality - my ability to analyze. I can give you that time. I can help set up an Watchdog Intel service to keep check on the renegade members of the Company. We both know they still work covertly all over the world, Paul. I have basic information gleaned through Krantz, and it can be extended. I can offer that, and you know how I work, god damnit! All I need is the technology and a venue and I can set up a team. You know I can! Anything! Anything to get her out!’
‘They want five years, Michael. Same as your original Fox River sentence. You will be deep cover. Sara walks. She walks, with no record. If you break cover during that time, she’s back inside and you are declared a wanted man again.’
‘I know she’ll never agree to it. Sara won’t let me give time for her, and she will want to serve her own-’
‘That’s where you’ll have to work this out, Michael. If you think Sara won’t agree, then you’re going to have to plan something to facilitate her egress from prison and NOT look back. You got that? That’s your speciality! Well then do it! There’s no turning back, not if you want Sara free.’
Michael did. The shock was merely an illusion of a magician who was torn between exposing the dirtiest tricks of his trade to the one he loved most, and protecting her from the very real saw blades that would rip her in half if she continued to lay in the box of that prison. He hated himself for his deception. He ranted silently at the world - at fate - as the electric sarcophagus released her, but entombed him. The sparks of his ruse vaulted a throttle of anger, and singed the tears to his cheeks while Michael finally succumbed to the bigger pressure pulsing his brain.
Darkness.
Now
Michael hurls the files so they bounce off his desk and erupt like a storm against the cold floor of the bunker. He’s alone, except for the wandering gloom of his male and female directors, and they bring about as much light to his day as a gale-force wind to a dilapidated harbour. It’s summer outside and Michael is sweltering beneath his shirt, but the sheer magnitude of this afternoon’s wind threatens to unveil the most furious of Floridian storms. He regales in the mood of the tempest.
‘The deal said FIVE years! As long as my Fox River sentence! I’m over half-way through. Way over!’
The directors rarely lose their composure, but Michael has never blown-out and lashed like cyclonic winds before, and the couple suddenly appear buffeted. They react according to their personalities. ‘You were incapacitated for the first year of your deal, Mr. Scofield. You did not contribute to this role for over twelve months!’
She’s nastier. ‘You can’t expect to be rewarded for lying in a hospital bed like a vegetable! You are twelve months in arrears, thus you are not over half-way in the timeline.’
He wants to blast out and hit something. Michael flails adrift in memories of furious exchanges, as though this association with anger will help temper the tirade of emotion - his spats with Self, the fireball of aggression he shared with Christina, the pure flood of hate and atonement he experienced when he crushed Bagwell to the floor for the very last time.
Nothing equates to this feeling, because the current threat relates to his present. His future; Sara and his child. ‘I want to talk to someone else. This cannot happen. It’s NOT part of the deal! I want to speak to-’
‘Who?’ interrupts the female director. ‘Paul Kellerman, right? Why? Because he made the original deal?’ The woman walks over to the window, stares at the promise of rain and wrath, and thunders a laugh back at Michael. ‘Oh yeah. But he’s probably too busy taking photos of your wife for you, and pushing his political barrow to listen . . .’
‘What?’
‘Come on, Scofield! You know it’s been Kellerman keeping an eye on your family, in between jetting to Washington to lay a base for possible political action. How could you not know it? It was him this entire time!’
Maybe he did know, somewhere beneath the residual dusting of shock and guilt and denial. ‘I have never spoken to him in person. He texts me, he emails, he sends photographs. I could not have known-’
‘He called you on the phone once, he visited you in your pathetic crippled state! The point is, Scofield, Kellerman has made too many allowances for you in this deal, and we don’t intend to involve him to reduce your timeline. There’s only one way to secure the time you want and you know what that is!’
He knows what it is, and it’s near impossible to achieve, although Devon and the team have been working shifts around the clock over the past six months to try and capture General Krantz’s right-hand man. He’s hiding in the Eastern Europe and does not want to be found.
‘I want to speak to Kellerman,’ is all Michael says, and a fresh wind of anger storms his reason as he thinks of Sara being watched by Paul Kellerman and living alone for another year.
‘Not going to happen, Mr. Scofield,’ comes the voice of the head guy, but Michael doesn’t listen. He suddenly needs air.
***
The thunder and lightening rip the sky apart, and Michael enters the outdoor leisure area of the complex just as heaven unleashes violent tears. He sinks to his knees and hands, pummeling the earth in time with the beating of his heart, wishing the force of the rain and the wind would drown his agitation forever.
He pounds and releases. He heaves profanity to the sky and rages at the muddied earth. He bows his head and lets the scourge of the rain crack against the back of his skull.
When the furor passes, there's a moment of absolute quietude, and he pledges - it’s time to stop burning bridges and construct a new route home around the eye of the storm.