Prison Break - Story of Faith (10/27)
Title: Story of Faith (10/27) - Story index
Author: clair-de-lune
Fandom: Prison Break
Characters: Michael, Sara, Lincoln, Paul Kellerman, Sofia Lugo, Jane Phillips, Michael Jr., LJ Burrows, Original characters
Pairings: Michael/Sara, Lincoln/Sofia (background)
Categories: Gen, romance
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~ 2.850 (this chapter), ~ 60.500 (total)
Author’s notes: This is canon compliant and a fix-it story. In other words, I tried to take into account most of the canon, including The Final Break, and give it a different ending. See chapter one for thanks and beta-readers.
Summary: He had thought that death was black. Dark, at the very least. It was dark at first, after the fireworks he’d created had subsided and their imprints on his retinas had faded. After that, though, there were colors.
After Miami Dade, while Sara, Lincoln and Sofia settle in Costa Rica and try to build a new life, Michael awakes far away from them... (Post-series, canon compliant, fix-it story)
Chapter 10
Michael sent a box of Legos to his son for Christmas - same method as the stuffed toy. The biggest box he could find, the one that would have Sara curse under her breath when she walked barefoot on one of the frigging bricks. Surely, he shouldn’t have smiled at that perspective. But he loved the idea of Sara and Mikey living mundane, normal lives; he binged on it, lived on it.
He didn’t need to discuss or bargain, this time. He mentioned to Mrs. Jamison that Christmas was coming. She didn’t say anything, gave no sign she even heard him, but the next day, he found a toy catalogue neatly set on his desk. He headed straight for the Legos section - what else? - and picked the largest box suitable for a two year-old. He kept flipping through the pages for long minutes after he’d made his choice, looking up only when he felt Yoki staring and smiling at him.
“I liked Legos,” he explained with a shrug. He never got the sort of fancy box he just picked for Mikey, but he loved his small sets of bricks all the same.
“It goes without saying.” Yoki winked at him. “I’m sure Mrs. Jamison would let you order a box for yourself.”
“I’m afraid I have other kinds of games, these days,” he said, nodding toward the couple of red and black files waiting for him.
That was the very same box of Legos that prompted a long-time coming discussion between Sara and Lincoln, a few months later.
There was the biggest, weirdest looking medieval castle on the floor of Sara’s living room, with red and green towers and a drawbridge that actually worked. Michael was asleep on the couch, snoring softly and suckling on his thumb despite Sara’s best efforts to prevent him from doing it. Sprawled on the floor, Lincoln was putting the last touch to their piece of work, ‘as a surprise for Michael when he wakes up’.
Sara smirked.
“Building things runs in the family, it seems. Must be in your blood.”
Lincoln looked up, the last brick of Lego for the dungeon still between his thick fingers, and stared at Sara for what seemed like hours, uncertainty pinching his face.
Damn.
Sara opened her mouth as though she could swallow back what she’d just said, and closed it again.
Damn.
(Damn. Shit. Fuck. Double fuck.)
She waited. She hadn’t meant to bring up the issue now - or ever as a matter of fact. It wasn’t an issue for her, had never been, would never be. Stupid quip.
Damn.
“Lincoln...”
“I’m not really his uncle,” he eventually said. He noticed the total absence of surprise or incomprehension on her face and added, “But Michael had told you about that, huh? Seriously, you guys. You didn’t have better subjects for your pillow talks than-”
“You are his uncle,” Sara cut him off.
“That’s not what Christina said.”
“Christina was a bitch and I shot her in the back.”
Lincoln couldn’t help chuckling and pointed a finger at Michael.
“Language, Mom.”
“A bitch who may or may have not lied, for all we know. She was prone to that, wasn’t she? Lying? Not that it changes a thing about the fact that you are his uncle. And the biggest pain in the ass of a brother-in-law a woman can have.”
Lincoln placed the last piece of the dungeon.
“Maybe she lied,” he admitted.
Sara slid down the couch and crawled on the floor to sit cross-legged near him. She hurt her hand on a yellow brick of Lego and cursed, which earned her another verbal rap on the knuckles.
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything. But if you ever want to be sure, there is a way,” Sara offered, her eyes trained on Michael.
It took a few seconds for the suggestion to register with Lincoln.
“Fuck, no!” he blurted out, forgetting his own rules about bad words. “I’m not poking holes in that kid to know if she was telling the truth or not!”
“I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t involve poking any holes.”
“Still. No way.”
“I get it.”
“Good.”
She stuck the offensive yellow brick on top of the construction.
“How long is this thing going to sit in my living room, by the way?”
The medieval castle was torn down and rebuilt into (Lincoln’s interpretation of) the Hyatt Center, which itself morphed into a series of improbable cars and boats. Sara followed the evolutions from afar - boys’ club, only Michael, Uncle Linc and occasionally LJ allowed to play - between housework, every-now-and-then shifts at the scuba shop, beach sessions, dozens of other tiny or not so tiny activities, and shooting practice.
Exactly, shooting practice. It had become part of her regular activities.
She’d acquired a gun months ago, sometime after Kellerman’s reassurance there wasn’t any danger. Maybe Kellerman’s word was good enough for Lincoln, but it sure wasn’t for her. She didn’t like guns. She hated them with the fire of a thousand suns, but she hated even more the odd and ongoing sensation of being under some kind of surveillance, the perspective of Michael being in danger, the thought of re-living one way or another what she went through a few years ago with Michael Sr.
So she had been practicing on a regular basis. Alone at first, with Jane’s help then, since Jane kept visiting from time to time. Sara joked that the woman had a crush on Lincoln; Lincoln joked she had a crush on Sara - which might be true, thinking of it, given how willing she’d been to help out with the shooting practice thing.
Lincoln didn’t know, and didn’t need to know, about the gun. It wasn’t just that she didn’t need his blessing. It was that what he didn’t know couldn’t hurt or worry him.
Until he walked in on Jane and her cleaning up their equipment.
He froze at the door of her living room - where the cars and boats made of Legos had been replaced with houses made of Legos - and stared for a while. Jane didn’t react, but Sara laid down her gun on the dining table and waited for the shoe to drop.
“Is this why you need LJ or me babysitting Michael every week?” he asked eventually. “So you can fucking shoot at things?”
His voice rose to an almost-roar of anger on the last words. She didn’t blink an eye. He didn’t impress her when he was shouting like that. She’d seen and gone through worse.
“Among other things.”
“And I’d bet my right hand it was her idea.” He pointed an accusatory index finger at Jane.
“Nope, just helping,” Jane said laconically. “She’s a good shot. Just needs me to improve herself.”
“A good shot?”
Jane nodded solemnly. “Yep.”
He looked away from her with exasperation.
“So, one morning, you just thought that learning how to fire a gun was a good idea, got up and illegally bought a piece?”
“I knew how to fire a gun, Lincoln. I shot Kim and Christina. Remember? Or did you think I got them by chance? My father wasn’t into gun control, but he was into knowing how to handle it safely if you owned one.”
He snorted in derision. “From all the ways you had to take after your father...”
She knew all that, had reflected on it during more sleepless nights than he could imagine. He was missing the point by a few hundred miles.
“I don’t feel safe,” she started reasonably. “I don’t care what Kellerman pretends, it’s not safe. If they come after Michael, I want to be-”
“Exactly, Michael! You have a three year-old kid in that house. Kids and guns don’t mix well.”
“Right. Because you know? I leave it loaded and all at Michael’s disposal in his toy box. Right near the bottle of bleach, the matches, and the codeine cough syrup.”
She shut up. He hated it when she was being sarcastic, partly because it pissed him off and partly because it reminded him of his brother’s holier-than-thou attitude. She could live with the former - no problem at all - but not so much with the latter.
He drew a chair and gingerly sat at the table with them. For a few minutes, he watched Jane cleaning her gun and Sara’s delicate fingers drumming on the butt of hers.
“That’s kinda hot,” he said after a while. “Pretty women and big guns.”
Jane rolled her eyes.
Sara brushed her hand over the barrel. “You know you find it hot because guns are phallic objects, right?”
“You know that if you’re caught with that kind of phallic object, you’ll be in huge trouble, right, Sarah Connor?”
She was well aware of that, thank you very much. She had weighed her options, evaluated the risks, the pros and the cons, and made an educated decision.
“It’s dragging you back,” he told her later, after Jane had left and he was done fixing a step on the veranda.
He was calm and serious, just enunciating the obvious. She could not not concede to him on that one.
“I know.”
She wasn’t coherent with herself, wanting to move on and rebuild a life, if only for her son, while letting her old fears and obsessions eat her. She couldn’t ignore the possible fallout, the consequences if she wasn’t cautious enough. That was the trick, the precarious balance to find.
“And to think that Michael asked me to keep an eye on you because you have a tendency to run into trouble,” she joked.
“My baby brother. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, was he?” Lincoln said with a grin.
Rebuild a life. Build a life. She’d been working on that since they arrived here, and Lincoln had too, with Sofia and the scuba shop. She’d told him once or twice that his brother would have been proud of him, but Lincoln had discarded the compliment with a grunt, awkward and not used to praise as he was. As for her, she had a smart and healthy kid and a home, and she was as happy as she could be, she discovered with a hint of surprise when she analyzed her situation.
“But?” Sofia asked when they broached the issue together; she shrugged at Sara’s questioning glance. “You sounded like there would be a but.”
There were several buts.
But Michael was growing up and soon - “In about ten years, Sara!” Sofia said with a laugh - he wouldn’t need her as much as he did now.
But she missed some aspects of her old life.
But if she wanted to build a life, she needed to build it, not just gather the pieces and make the best of them - not that it hadn’t been a slow process, not that it wasn’t an achievement in itself.
Her medical license had been revoked and even if it hadn’t, she was still a fugitive. She couldn’t be a doctor anymore.
“When Michael starts school, maybe you can work at the scuba shop? We’re doing well enough that I can pay you,” Lincoln offered.
She didn’t need the money and Lincoln knew it. More importantly... “I’d like that. Sofia has told me that it was quite busy and she could use a couple of free days every now and then?” He nodded. “But this isn’t exactly what I meant, you know?”
Shelters, environmentalist organizations, orphanages, AA meetings and what nots - there was no shortage of choice. She’d become a doctor because she wanted to help. She couldn’t help anymore by practicing medicine, but there were other ways.
She applied to volunteer at the nearest orphanage and avoided discussing the reasons of her choice with Lincoln.
TBC
Previous / next chapters
--If you enjoy the fic (or if you don't, but you know... hopefully if you do ;)), please let me know :)
Author: clair-de-lune
Fandom: Prison Break
Characters: Michael, Sara, Lincoln, Paul Kellerman, Sofia Lugo, Jane Phillips, Michael Jr., LJ Burrows, Original characters
Pairings: Michael/Sara, Lincoln/Sofia (background)
Categories: Gen, romance
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~ 2.850 (this chapter), ~ 60.500 (total)
Author’s notes: This is canon compliant and a fix-it story. In other words, I tried to take into account most of the canon, including The Final Break, and give it a different ending. See chapter one for thanks and beta-readers.
Summary: He had thought that death was black. Dark, at the very least. It was dark at first, after the fireworks he’d created had subsided and their imprints on his retinas had faded. After that, though, there were colors.
After Miami Dade, while Sara, Lincoln and Sofia settle in Costa Rica and try to build a new life, Michael awakes far away from them... (Post-series, canon compliant, fix-it story)
Chapter 10
Michael sent a box of Legos to his son for Christmas - same method as the stuffed toy. The biggest box he could find, the one that would have Sara curse under her breath when she walked barefoot on one of the frigging bricks. Surely, he shouldn’t have smiled at that perspective. But he loved the idea of Sara and Mikey living mundane, normal lives; he binged on it, lived on it.
He didn’t need to discuss or bargain, this time. He mentioned to Mrs. Jamison that Christmas was coming. She didn’t say anything, gave no sign she even heard him, but the next day, he found a toy catalogue neatly set on his desk. He headed straight for the Legos section - what else? - and picked the largest box suitable for a two year-old. He kept flipping through the pages for long minutes after he’d made his choice, looking up only when he felt Yoki staring and smiling at him.
“I liked Legos,” he explained with a shrug. He never got the sort of fancy box he just picked for Mikey, but he loved his small sets of bricks all the same.
“It goes without saying.” Yoki winked at him. “I’m sure Mrs. Jamison would let you order a box for yourself.”
“I’m afraid I have other kinds of games, these days,” he said, nodding toward the couple of red and black files waiting for him.
That was the very same box of Legos that prompted a long-time coming discussion between Sara and Lincoln, a few months later.
There was the biggest, weirdest looking medieval castle on the floor of Sara’s living room, with red and green towers and a drawbridge that actually worked. Michael was asleep on the couch, snoring softly and suckling on his thumb despite Sara’s best efforts to prevent him from doing it. Sprawled on the floor, Lincoln was putting the last touch to their piece of work, ‘as a surprise for Michael when he wakes up’.
Sara smirked.
“Building things runs in the family, it seems. Must be in your blood.”
Lincoln looked up, the last brick of Lego for the dungeon still between his thick fingers, and stared at Sara for what seemed like hours, uncertainty pinching his face.
Damn.
Sara opened her mouth as though she could swallow back what she’d just said, and closed it again.
Damn.
(Damn. Shit. Fuck. Double fuck.)
She waited. She hadn’t meant to bring up the issue now - or ever as a matter of fact. It wasn’t an issue for her, had never been, would never be. Stupid quip.
Damn.
“Lincoln...”
“I’m not really his uncle,” he eventually said. He noticed the total absence of surprise or incomprehension on her face and added, “But Michael had told you about that, huh? Seriously, you guys. You didn’t have better subjects for your pillow talks than-”
“You are his uncle,” Sara cut him off.
“That’s not what Christina said.”
“Christina was a bitch and I shot her in the back.”
Lincoln couldn’t help chuckling and pointed a finger at Michael.
“Language, Mom.”
“A bitch who may or may have not lied, for all we know. She was prone to that, wasn’t she? Lying? Not that it changes a thing about the fact that you are his uncle. And the biggest pain in the ass of a brother-in-law a woman can have.”
Lincoln placed the last piece of the dungeon.
“Maybe she lied,” he admitted.
Sara slid down the couch and crawled on the floor to sit cross-legged near him. She hurt her hand on a yellow brick of Lego and cursed, which earned her another verbal rap on the knuckles.
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything. But if you ever want to be sure, there is a way,” Sara offered, her eyes trained on Michael.
It took a few seconds for the suggestion to register with Lincoln.
“Fuck, no!” he blurted out, forgetting his own rules about bad words. “I’m not poking holes in that kid to know if she was telling the truth or not!”
“I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t involve poking any holes.”
“Still. No way.”
“I get it.”
“Good.”
She stuck the offensive yellow brick on top of the construction.
“How long is this thing going to sit in my living room, by the way?”
The medieval castle was torn down and rebuilt into (Lincoln’s interpretation of) the Hyatt Center, which itself morphed into a series of improbable cars and boats. Sara followed the evolutions from afar - boys’ club, only Michael, Uncle Linc and occasionally LJ allowed to play - between housework, every-now-and-then shifts at the scuba shop, beach sessions, dozens of other tiny or not so tiny activities, and shooting practice.
Exactly, shooting practice. It had become part of her regular activities.
She’d acquired a gun months ago, sometime after Kellerman’s reassurance there wasn’t any danger. Maybe Kellerman’s word was good enough for Lincoln, but it sure wasn’t for her. She didn’t like guns. She hated them with the fire of a thousand suns, but she hated even more the odd and ongoing sensation of being under some kind of surveillance, the perspective of Michael being in danger, the thought of re-living one way or another what she went through a few years ago with Michael Sr.
So she had been practicing on a regular basis. Alone at first, with Jane’s help then, since Jane kept visiting from time to time. Sara joked that the woman had a crush on Lincoln; Lincoln joked she had a crush on Sara - which might be true, thinking of it, given how willing she’d been to help out with the shooting practice thing.
Lincoln didn’t know, and didn’t need to know, about the gun. It wasn’t just that she didn’t need his blessing. It was that what he didn’t know couldn’t hurt or worry him.
Until he walked in on Jane and her cleaning up their equipment.
He froze at the door of her living room - where the cars and boats made of Legos had been replaced with houses made of Legos - and stared for a while. Jane didn’t react, but Sara laid down her gun on the dining table and waited for the shoe to drop.
“Is this why you need LJ or me babysitting Michael every week?” he asked eventually. “So you can fucking shoot at things?”
His voice rose to an almost-roar of anger on the last words. She didn’t blink an eye. He didn’t impress her when he was shouting like that. She’d seen and gone through worse.
“Among other things.”
“And I’d bet my right hand it was her idea.” He pointed an accusatory index finger at Jane.
“Nope, just helping,” Jane said laconically. “She’s a good shot. Just needs me to improve herself.”
“A good shot?”
Jane nodded solemnly. “Yep.”
He looked away from her with exasperation.
“So, one morning, you just thought that learning how to fire a gun was a good idea, got up and illegally bought a piece?”
“I knew how to fire a gun, Lincoln. I shot Kim and Christina. Remember? Or did you think I got them by chance? My father wasn’t into gun control, but he was into knowing how to handle it safely if you owned one.”
He snorted in derision. “From all the ways you had to take after your father...”
She knew all that, had reflected on it during more sleepless nights than he could imagine. He was missing the point by a few hundred miles.
“I don’t feel safe,” she started reasonably. “I don’t care what Kellerman pretends, it’s not safe. If they come after Michael, I want to be-”
“Exactly, Michael! You have a three year-old kid in that house. Kids and guns don’t mix well.”
“Right. Because you know? I leave it loaded and all at Michael’s disposal in his toy box. Right near the bottle of bleach, the matches, and the codeine cough syrup.”
She shut up. He hated it when she was being sarcastic, partly because it pissed him off and partly because it reminded him of his brother’s holier-than-thou attitude. She could live with the former - no problem at all - but not so much with the latter.
He drew a chair and gingerly sat at the table with them. For a few minutes, he watched Jane cleaning her gun and Sara’s delicate fingers drumming on the butt of hers.
“That’s kinda hot,” he said after a while. “Pretty women and big guns.”
Jane rolled her eyes.
Sara brushed her hand over the barrel. “You know you find it hot because guns are phallic objects, right?”
“You know that if you’re caught with that kind of phallic object, you’ll be in huge trouble, right, Sarah Connor?”
She was well aware of that, thank you very much. She had weighed her options, evaluated the risks, the pros and the cons, and made an educated decision.
“It’s dragging you back,” he told her later, after Jane had left and he was done fixing a step on the veranda.
He was calm and serious, just enunciating the obvious. She could not not concede to him on that one.
“I know.”
She wasn’t coherent with herself, wanting to move on and rebuild a life, if only for her son, while letting her old fears and obsessions eat her. She couldn’t ignore the possible fallout, the consequences if she wasn’t cautious enough. That was the trick, the precarious balance to find.
“And to think that Michael asked me to keep an eye on you because you have a tendency to run into trouble,” she joked.
“My baby brother. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, was he?” Lincoln said with a grin.
Rebuild a life. Build a life. She’d been working on that since they arrived here, and Lincoln had too, with Sofia and the scuba shop. She’d told him once or twice that his brother would have been proud of him, but Lincoln had discarded the compliment with a grunt, awkward and not used to praise as he was. As for her, she had a smart and healthy kid and a home, and she was as happy as she could be, she discovered with a hint of surprise when she analyzed her situation.
“But?” Sofia asked when they broached the issue together; she shrugged at Sara’s questioning glance. “You sounded like there would be a but.”
There were several buts.
But Michael was growing up and soon - “In about ten years, Sara!” Sofia said with a laugh - he wouldn’t need her as much as he did now.
But she missed some aspects of her old life.
But if she wanted to build a life, she needed to build it, not just gather the pieces and make the best of them - not that it hadn’t been a slow process, not that it wasn’t an achievement in itself.
Her medical license had been revoked and even if it hadn’t, she was still a fugitive. She couldn’t be a doctor anymore.
“When Michael starts school, maybe you can work at the scuba shop? We’re doing well enough that I can pay you,” Lincoln offered.
She didn’t need the money and Lincoln knew it. More importantly... “I’d like that. Sofia has told me that it was quite busy and she could use a couple of free days every now and then?” He nodded. “But this isn’t exactly what I meant, you know?”
Shelters, environmentalist organizations, orphanages, AA meetings and what nots - there was no shortage of choice. She’d become a doctor because she wanted to help. She couldn’t help anymore by practicing medicine, but there were other ways.
She applied to volunteer at the nearest orphanage and avoided discussing the reasons of her choice with Lincoln.
TBC
Previous / next chapters
--If you enjoy the fic (or if you don't, but you know... hopefully if you do ;)), please let me know :)