Seven 6/7: Depression
Characters: Michael, mentions of Sara, original characters.
Chapter: 6: Depression
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. Two piece of canon dialogue used here (1:19 and 4:22)
Depression
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year, Running over the same old ground. What have you found? The same old fears.
from Wish you were Here, by Pink Floyd.
His body is weary, but his memory alights with everything her.
Michael’s mind pins the man to the floor of the deepest well, where it’s dark and dank, where the light no longer penetrates and all hope seems lost. He remembers feeling like this - sweating, tucked beneath a fugitive’s cap, seeking out a church, crying inside his confession. It’s worse this time. Somehow worse, because he’s experienced utter happiness during the simplicity of a twenty second walk on a beach. He’s lost it. It makes it worse.
I’m happy right now.
The instant he learns that the first year of his ‘sentence’ doesn’t count, the throes of anger zap his mood to dust. Where he spent previous weeks working on the hunt to track Krantz’s international counterpart - Robert Vasling - through Europe, his interest in the task drops to zero as inroads meet dead ends, and the director’s words about one more year run a loop in his brain.
Even though he knows attaining Vasling will keep his time in this role to five years, there’s a well of despair and nothingness at the bottom of his being, and Michael sits on the verge of descent without rescue from the top of the structure.
He should be at war with himself - come on, Scofield, work harder! Get true intel on this bastard Vasling and secure the agreed upon terms of the deal you made with Kellerman! Come on, get out of this low patch - but he just can’t seem to muster the vitality to wage the battle. For the first time in an age, he stumbles about, he struggles to plan, and he wonders whether this is what it feels like to finally give up.
***
There is no escaping his daily obligation. The demands of his work continue, but Michael is only interested when either he or his team receive a lead on Vasling. He no longer cares about the residual members of the Company, even though accurate intel comes through their system very regularly. Michael simply uses Devon and his small staff to meet the needs of the day while he watches a black oil slick threaten his psyche as he approaches rock bottom. His apathy is noticed, first by Devon and then - over the coming months - by the directors.
Devon approaches him first. When the gentle man asks Michael what is specifically wrong and why he is spending less time leading the team in all pursuits, Michael is startled by the questions. Is he? He feels disinterested, but is it evident?
He rumbles out something about the directors and another year added onto his working stay because of his tumour and recovery. Devon is quick to reply that he didn’t know. That he is sorry. Michael would like to snipe at him that HE doesn’t have a wife with jail bars imprinted to the inside of her wrist and that HE is not here on an in-house suspension, but he lacks the energy to be bothered. That, and Devon is a nice guy - Michael still has enough insight to realize none of this is his fault.
‘Then we need to rethink our Vasling strategy, Michael. Let’s review his recent travel into Prague,’ Devon says over dinner that evening. The government facility feeds their staff very well, even though Michael has neither the appetite nor the title of staff at his disposal. He pushes his vegetables around his plate with a fork, hoping if he reshuffles his food enough, it will disappear off his plate and magically alkalinize the acid-rage of his gut. It doesn’t. He finds he doesn’t care. Eating is for life outside the well.
‘That particular Prague lead has gone cold. Remember?’ He wants to be friendlier. He finds he can’t. His words ring with lethargy.
‘We haven’t checked Recon Team Two since last week. We know Team One had nothing, but Team Two will still be out collecting data and-’
‘You know something, Devon? Vasling is so evasive, I think we could be looking for him over the next decade and still be unable to find him. It’s just not worth it! Prague is not worth our time!’
Suddenly, Michael feels the warmth of his first non-medical human touch for years. He’s taken back to the time the watcher - Kellerman - lingered around his bedside subconscious. He had touched him! He is sure Kellerman showed him some form of tactile support during the time he was bedridden, and now Devon is reaching out his hand to Michael’s arm in a gesture of kindness. Perhaps there is still some form of salvation at the base of the pit?
‘Michael?’ Devon’s voice sings with the blessing of the Irish. ‘You don’t have a decade, friend. You need to get home to your beautiful woman and your boyo before young Michael is taller and more handsome than you! Which will NOT be long, for sure, given your hideous face, and all!’
He wants to smile. He wants to acknowledge Devon as a Fernando Sucre figure of positivity and light in this dark-fest, but Michael cannot. Instead, a swaddling of tears unfurls from his eyes. He is mortified. He feels Devon’s hand retract from his arm, as though the other man reads his need to distance himself from his emotion. ‘I-I-I have to go. Bed,’ he mutters.
‘Wait. With your permission, Michael, I’m going to work as lead on the Prague thing without anybody else knowing about it. For the next little while, you play point, okay? Just until we get through this patch. Just until we get closer to some new intel about Vasling? How’s that? No one else need know.’
Michael can only nod with gratitude as the tears fall. He watches them through blurred vision as they ping onto his fork, rebound off china and create an aqueous pod around a scattering of peas. His favourite vegetable in times of old, now left to grow as cold as the recent leads on Robert Vasling.
***
He’d taken it off once, and it had been the ultimate mistake, as though the removal of his brand new wedding band had brokered this major downward spiral. Michael had been pushing to extradite Sara, and felt the gold of his ring might distract him as his hands worked their Houdini magic for them both. It might flash, it might slip off, it might foil his major plan in some small way.
He’d been wrong.
The moment he took it off, if felt like an artery had been severed - like the unleashing of a life-preserving tourniquet, the gold ring came away from his finger and Michael experienced a rush of adrenalin he knew could kill him. In actual fact, his health took a tumble from that point, but he’ll never forget how his naked finger had nursed its invisible weight - Michael sensed its very presence as vividly as an amputee would feel the ghost of a limb lost at war.
He’d carried it in his shirt pocket. Throughout his negotiation with Kellerman, while visiting Sara in prison and during the final stage when she’d told him she loved him and wouldn’t leave him. Michael held his wedding ring in his left chest pocket. It was close to his heart, and when he’d pressed his palms to her abdomen, it was as though the ring had mingled with his skin in smelter, and the endless circle of gold had wept with the betrayal of her trust.
In the seconds before Michael had rigged the final shock, he had grappled inside his shirt, removed the ring and placed it on his finger ~
it hasn’t left his attention in over three years. He watches it from the corner of his eyes while his fingers work the keyboard, he sees it through the clear water of a drinking glass. He dreams about how it will look meshed in the auburn of Sara’s hair, he finds himself wondering how it will appear against the sheen of her naked skin.
Michael is rotating the gold band around his finger and looking at his family pictures when a call comes in a month after his dinner chat with Devon. The voice on the other end of the line takes him completely by surprise. Strangely, it’s not unexpected either.
‘Your directors mentioned you wanted to talk, Michael? That things might not be going too well, and they felt I could shed some light on developments?’
The preliminaries are short with Paul Kellerman, and Michael likes this. It’s business, and he is keen to get down to the basics. ‘A long time ago, they told me you wouldn’t call. I couldn’t speak to you.’
‘Well here I am. Change of plan - a concept I know you are very familiar with. They tell me your work has been a little off-key? What’s the situation, Michael?’
He pauses. It’s only for a second, just while he presses the warm gold of the wedding band to his lips and rests his forehead against the edge of a table in his living quarters. ‘It’s the deal. What’s the situation with the deal?’
‘Five years, Mr. Scofield. You are the genius. You know the numbers as well as I do.’
‘It’s changed,’ he hears his voice crack over the line. Michael draws a breath to ensure he doesn’t sound as vulnerable as a little boy stabbing at the food on his plate, when in reality, he is the solitary man at the base of an insurmountable well. The blackness creeps every closer. ‘They are adding on the year for the initial time I lost . . . when I was sick.’
‘Ah.’ Michael’s sure he hears a clip of annoyance to Kellerman’s tone, but he can’t be positive. ‘Okay. So this came from your directors? Is it dependent on securing Robert Vasling? I assume they’re using this as . . . um . . . motivation?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know what you have to do, Michael. Find Vasling! There might even be a reduction in your time if-’
‘That’s the point, Paul,’ Michael bites out, the waves of depression threatening to flood the base of the well. He’s dying. It will be easier, surely if he does? Just die? ‘We are losing all contact, leads are going cold, we have no way to-’
‘Michael?’ Kellerman interrupts, and he lets him. ‘Leave it with me, okay? Just do your job, and leave this other development with me. Now, more importantly, I’ve got a couple more pictures for you, so I will email them . . .’
Standing from the bottom of his blackened pit looking upwards, Michael cannot see any light from the gloom of the self-made prison he has designed. He hears words in his ears about Sara and Michael, family and photos, but they buzz is only like background noise through the distraction of woe. What the fuck is wrong with him? He has NEVER been like this - so apathetic, so ineffectual? And then he knows. It’s the separation from family, it’s his desperate want of her, it’s the virtual unknown. It’s the absolute need to know:
‘How’s Sara?’ he asks, skirting what he really has to ask. The wraith of depression seeps through his system, threatening his will.
‘I’ve said. She’s working, she’s going along as well as usual. She’s staying in touch with Lincoln. Michael’s growing more and-’
‘Is she . . . is she? Is Sara seeing anyone else? Is she?’
Wait for me . . . ?
He’s said it. Michael feels the oil slick sidle up to the depressed man sitting inside the well, and suddenly his lungs are thickened and threatened by the sludge of drowning. He will drown! His lungs will capsize with despair. He feels like his hands are tied against the ebb of black rot.
‘No evidence of that, Michael,’ he hears Kellerman’s voice saying. Even though Paul continues on with words like quest and Robert Vasling and work, the mind in the well shifts from the man and starts to push upwards towards the glimmer of light offered by the watcher’s words.
‘What did you say? About Sara?’
‘I said there appears to be no one else! Now, about Vasling . . .’
But Michael latches onto the possibility. Perhaps there is hope beyond the desolation after all.
Chapter: 6: Depression
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. Two piece of canon dialogue used here (1:19 and 4:22)
Depression
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year, Running over the same old ground. What have you found? The same old fears.
from Wish you were Here, by Pink Floyd.
His body is weary, but his memory alights with everything her.
Michael’s mind pins the man to the floor of the deepest well, where it’s dark and dank, where the light no longer penetrates and all hope seems lost. He remembers feeling like this - sweating, tucked beneath a fugitive’s cap, seeking out a church, crying inside his confession. It’s worse this time. Somehow worse, because he’s experienced utter happiness during the simplicity of a twenty second walk on a beach. He’s lost it. It makes it worse.
I’m happy right now.
The instant he learns that the first year of his ‘sentence’ doesn’t count, the throes of anger zap his mood to dust. Where he spent previous weeks working on the hunt to track Krantz’s international counterpart - Robert Vasling - through Europe, his interest in the task drops to zero as inroads meet dead ends, and the director’s words about one more year run a loop in his brain.
Even though he knows attaining Vasling will keep his time in this role to five years, there’s a well of despair and nothingness at the bottom of his being, and Michael sits on the verge of descent without rescue from the top of the structure.
He should be at war with himself - come on, Scofield, work harder! Get true intel on this bastard Vasling and secure the agreed upon terms of the deal you made with Kellerman! Come on, get out of this low patch - but he just can’t seem to muster the vitality to wage the battle. For the first time in an age, he stumbles about, he struggles to plan, and he wonders whether this is what it feels like to finally give up.
***
There is no escaping his daily obligation. The demands of his work continue, but Michael is only interested when either he or his team receive a lead on Vasling. He no longer cares about the residual members of the Company, even though accurate intel comes through their system very regularly. Michael simply uses Devon and his small staff to meet the needs of the day while he watches a black oil slick threaten his psyche as he approaches rock bottom. His apathy is noticed, first by Devon and then - over the coming months - by the directors.
Devon approaches him first. When the gentle man asks Michael what is specifically wrong and why he is spending less time leading the team in all pursuits, Michael is startled by the questions. Is he? He feels disinterested, but is it evident?
He rumbles out something about the directors and another year added onto his working stay because of his tumour and recovery. Devon is quick to reply that he didn’t know. That he is sorry. Michael would like to snipe at him that HE doesn’t have a wife with jail bars imprinted to the inside of her wrist and that HE is not here on an in-house suspension, but he lacks the energy to be bothered. That, and Devon is a nice guy - Michael still has enough insight to realize none of this is his fault.
‘Then we need to rethink our Vasling strategy, Michael. Let’s review his recent travel into Prague,’ Devon says over dinner that evening. The government facility feeds their staff very well, even though Michael has neither the appetite nor the title of staff at his disposal. He pushes his vegetables around his plate with a fork, hoping if he reshuffles his food enough, it will disappear off his plate and magically alkalinize the acid-rage of his gut. It doesn’t. He finds he doesn’t care. Eating is for life outside the well.
‘That particular Prague lead has gone cold. Remember?’ He wants to be friendlier. He finds he can’t. His words ring with lethargy.
‘We haven’t checked Recon Team Two since last week. We know Team One had nothing, but Team Two will still be out collecting data and-’
‘You know something, Devon? Vasling is so evasive, I think we could be looking for him over the next decade and still be unable to find him. It’s just not worth it! Prague is not worth our time!’
Suddenly, Michael feels the warmth of his first non-medical human touch for years. He’s taken back to the time the watcher - Kellerman - lingered around his bedside subconscious. He had touched him! He is sure Kellerman showed him some form of tactile support during the time he was bedridden, and now Devon is reaching out his hand to Michael’s arm in a gesture of kindness. Perhaps there is still some form of salvation at the base of the pit?
‘Michael?’ Devon’s voice sings with the blessing of the Irish. ‘You don’t have a decade, friend. You need to get home to your beautiful woman and your boyo before young Michael is taller and more handsome than you! Which will NOT be long, for sure, given your hideous face, and all!’
He wants to smile. He wants to acknowledge Devon as a Fernando Sucre figure of positivity and light in this dark-fest, but Michael cannot. Instead, a swaddling of tears unfurls from his eyes. He is mortified. He feels Devon’s hand retract from his arm, as though the other man reads his need to distance himself from his emotion. ‘I-I-I have to go. Bed,’ he mutters.
‘Wait. With your permission, Michael, I’m going to work as lead on the Prague thing without anybody else knowing about it. For the next little while, you play point, okay? Just until we get through this patch. Just until we get closer to some new intel about Vasling? How’s that? No one else need know.’
Michael can only nod with gratitude as the tears fall. He watches them through blurred vision as they ping onto his fork, rebound off china and create an aqueous pod around a scattering of peas. His favourite vegetable in times of old, now left to grow as cold as the recent leads on Robert Vasling.
***
He’d taken it off once, and it had been the ultimate mistake, as though the removal of his brand new wedding band had brokered this major downward spiral. Michael had been pushing to extradite Sara, and felt the gold of his ring might distract him as his hands worked their Houdini magic for them both. It might flash, it might slip off, it might foil his major plan in some small way.
He’d been wrong.
The moment he took it off, if felt like an artery had been severed - like the unleashing of a life-preserving tourniquet, the gold ring came away from his finger and Michael experienced a rush of adrenalin he knew could kill him. In actual fact, his health took a tumble from that point, but he’ll never forget how his naked finger had nursed its invisible weight - Michael sensed its very presence as vividly as an amputee would feel the ghost of a limb lost at war.
He’d carried it in his shirt pocket. Throughout his negotiation with Kellerman, while visiting Sara in prison and during the final stage when she’d told him she loved him and wouldn’t leave him. Michael held his wedding ring in his left chest pocket. It was close to his heart, and when he’d pressed his palms to her abdomen, it was as though the ring had mingled with his skin in smelter, and the endless circle of gold had wept with the betrayal of her trust.
In the seconds before Michael had rigged the final shock, he had grappled inside his shirt, removed the ring and placed it on his finger ~
it hasn’t left his attention in over three years. He watches it from the corner of his eyes while his fingers work the keyboard, he sees it through the clear water of a drinking glass. He dreams about how it will look meshed in the auburn of Sara’s hair, he finds himself wondering how it will appear against the sheen of her naked skin.
Michael is rotating the gold band around his finger and looking at his family pictures when a call comes in a month after his dinner chat with Devon. The voice on the other end of the line takes him completely by surprise. Strangely, it’s not unexpected either.
‘Your directors mentioned you wanted to talk, Michael? That things might not be going too well, and they felt I could shed some light on developments?’
The preliminaries are short with Paul Kellerman, and Michael likes this. It’s business, and he is keen to get down to the basics. ‘A long time ago, they told me you wouldn’t call. I couldn’t speak to you.’
‘Well here I am. Change of plan - a concept I know you are very familiar with. They tell me your work has been a little off-key? What’s the situation, Michael?’
He pauses. It’s only for a second, just while he presses the warm gold of the wedding band to his lips and rests his forehead against the edge of a table in his living quarters. ‘It’s the deal. What’s the situation with the deal?’
‘Five years, Mr. Scofield. You are the genius. You know the numbers as well as I do.’
‘It’s changed,’ he hears his voice crack over the line. Michael draws a breath to ensure he doesn’t sound as vulnerable as a little boy stabbing at the food on his plate, when in reality, he is the solitary man at the base of an insurmountable well. The blackness creeps every closer. ‘They are adding on the year for the initial time I lost . . . when I was sick.’
‘Ah.’ Michael’s sure he hears a clip of annoyance to Kellerman’s tone, but he can’t be positive. ‘Okay. So this came from your directors? Is it dependent on securing Robert Vasling? I assume they’re using this as . . . um . . . motivation?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know what you have to do, Michael. Find Vasling! There might even be a reduction in your time if-’
‘That’s the point, Paul,’ Michael bites out, the waves of depression threatening to flood the base of the well. He’s dying. It will be easier, surely if he does? Just die? ‘We are losing all contact, leads are going cold, we have no way to-’
‘Michael?’ Kellerman interrupts, and he lets him. ‘Leave it with me, okay? Just do your job, and leave this other development with me. Now, more importantly, I’ve got a couple more pictures for you, so I will email them . . .’
Standing from the bottom of his blackened pit looking upwards, Michael cannot see any light from the gloom of the self-made prison he has designed. He hears words in his ears about Sara and Michael, family and photos, but they buzz is only like background noise through the distraction of woe. What the fuck is wrong with him? He has NEVER been like this - so apathetic, so ineffectual? And then he knows. It’s the separation from family, it’s his desperate want of her, it’s the virtual unknown. It’s the absolute need to know:
‘How’s Sara?’ he asks, skirting what he really has to ask. The wraith of depression seeps through his system, threatening his will.
‘I’ve said. She’s working, she’s going along as well as usual. She’s staying in touch with Lincoln. Michael’s growing more and-’
‘Is she . . . is she? Is Sara seeing anyone else? Is she?’
Wait for me . . . ?
He’s said it. Michael feels the oil slick sidle up to the depressed man sitting inside the well, and suddenly his lungs are thickened and threatened by the sludge of drowning. He will drown! His lungs will capsize with despair. He feels like his hands are tied against the ebb of black rot.
‘No evidence of that, Michael,’ he hears Kellerman’s voice saying. Even though Paul continues on with words like quest and Robert Vasling and work, the mind in the well shifts from the man and starts to push upwards towards the glimmer of light offered by the watcher’s words.
‘What did you say? About Sara?’
‘I said there appears to be no one else! Now, about Vasling . . .’
But Michael latches onto the possibility. Perhaps there is hope beyond the desolation after all.