Five Times Michael's Behavior Confounded Lincoln
A/N: Some kid!fic mixed with moments from the show and a possible outcome in Panama...This is mostly a general story. There are implied moments of M/S and then a little finale with L/J, but it's mostly about Michael and Lincoln from Linc's POV.
Confound (verb): to perplex or amaze.
Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical;
and no monster should amaze us
if the normal man does not amaze.
~Gilbert K. Chesterton
“How’d’ja fix it?” Lincoln asked, eyeing his 7-year-old brother warily.
“I took it apart,” Michael replied matter-of-factly. “Two wires inside had come loose. I just tightened the screws they were under.”
Lincoln shook the transistor radio, but it did nothing to stop the sound coming softly from the speaker. “You’re lyin’,” he accused.
“Linc,” Michael said in exasperation, snatching the radio from his older brother’s hand. “It works, doesn’t it? How else do you explain it?”
“You got Mom to fix it,” Lincoln offered, drawing his brows down over his blue eyes in a frown as he watched Michael fiddling with the dial on the radio.
“You know Momma would never help me fix it. She was glad it broke so we couldn’t sneak listening to Cubs’ games anymore.” Michael raised his head so that their eyes met as he got the radio on the right station that broadcast the baseball games they had not been able to listen to for the last week.
Lincoln didn’t respond, because this was very true, and he knew they would have to be careful that their mother didn’t find the repaired radio. But it still seemed impossible that his brother, who was almost five years younger than him, could have fixed it. Michael was too little to keep from losing his lunch money every day to older, bigger, meaner boys unless Lincoln was there to step in, but he could fix a radio, just by taking the plastic backing off and messing with the insides?
Of course, that was what it would have been if Lincoln had taken the plastic backing off-messing with it. Michael taking it off was…different. Lincoln couldn’t understand how his brother had done it, but as they snuggled under the pillows in their shared bed so their mother couldn’t hear the radio, and the Cubs scored a run, he wrapped an arm around Michael, hugging him.
“What’re you doin’?” Michael whispered, squirming closer.
“I can’t hear it very good,” Lincoln lied, laying his head on Michael’s shoulder.
“Can you hear it now?” Michael asked, pushing the radio closer to Lincoln’s ear.
“Yeah, Mikey. I can hear it just fine.”
~*~
“You’re shittin’ me!” Lincoln tried to hold his laughter in, but it was impossible. As Michael’s tale escalated about how he saved his chemistry class from third degree burns due to a mistake by the teacher, it had gotten funnier and funnier.
“Stop laughing, Linc,” Michael wailed, his disposition more dejected than bragging, which was what Linc would have been doing if he’d been Michael. Lincoln couldn’t understand why his little brother wasn’t more proud of his incredible brain, and the fact that a chemistry experiment had been kept from going terribly awry by his swift intervention.
Lincoln had fallen to the couch in their apartment, holding his belly as he continued to laugh, but something in Michael’s tone reached out and wrapped around his mind, and he knew that while it appeared to be the funniest thing ever, something bad had followed Michael’s amazing save. “What is it?” he asked, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes.
“I got sent to the principal’s office after that, and they would have called you, but I told ‘em you weren’t home anyway. They suspended me for two days.” Michael’s head hung morosely.
Sitting up suddenly, Lincoln demanded, “What?! What the hell? You saved the school from burning down, and they suspended you? What for?”
“For disrespecting Mr. Ford, my chemistry teacher and being disruptive in class,” Michael said sadly.
“Oh, give me a fuckin’ break!” Lincoln exclaimed. “I’ll go down there and give them what for, Michael. That’s ridiculous. If it wasn’t for you-“
“I didn’t realize how bad it was until you started laughing about it. No wonder, he must have been humiliated,” Michael interrupted.
“Who was humiliated? Your stupid chem teacher who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing? He deserves to be humiliated. If the 15-year-old in his class can teach better than he can? Yeah, he fucking deserves to be humiliated.”
Michael started shaking his head quickly. “No, Linc, that’s not right,” he said earnestly. “Mr. Ford just got his chemicals confused. He didn’t mean for it to happen. And I shouldn’t have jumped up and pushed my way in like I did. I should have handled it differently.”
“Michael, you are too fucking nice for your own good. You don’t deserve to be suspended.” As Lincoln looked at his younger brother, his heart swelled in remembrance of their mother, who had been dead for more than four years; it wasn’t a good thing that he was so profusely reminded of her by Michael and his screwy sense of compassion. It was too much. And in a world that would kick your ass all too quickly if you turned your back on it, Lincoln worried incessantly for his little brother. “I’ll go down there and talk to the principal,” he offered. “I won’t cuss him out or anything, I’ll just explain that you were trying to help-“
“No, Linc. I think it would be better if I don’t go to school for the two days. I’ll just keep up on all my homework, and it won’t hurt my grades or anything. And maybe then Mr. Ford won’t be mad at me when I go back to his class.”
“Oh, screw that. You aren’t going back to his class,” Lincoln said emphatically. When Michael’s wide eyes pivoted to him, Lincoln raised a hand to silence his brother. “You want to accept the punishment, fine. But you aren’t going back to that class. You did the right thing. I’ll back you up on this crazy-Mr.-Nice-Guy thing, but only if you get out of that asshole’s class.”
“Linc…” Michael’s voice wobbled and Lincoln was sure he saw tears in his brother’s colorful eyes.
“It’s either this, or I go down there and raise hell about the suspension.” Lincoln crossed his arms over his chest, the universal Burrows/Scofield signal for I’m not backing down.
Michael blinked rapidly, slowly gaining control over his emotions. Then he nodded briefly. “If you think it’s for the best,” he said, capitulating to his brother.
Lincoln eyed him suspiciously. “You think by agreeing with me, you’re not humiliating me, huh?” he asked, reaching out to wrap his hand around Michael’s elbow to pull him down on the couch next to him.
A small smile touched Michael’s face. “You’re the boss, Linc,” he said, shooting a sidelong glance at his brother.
“You’re a little shit, you know that?” Lincoln asked as he reached for the remote.
“Yeah, I know,” Michael agreed, snatching the remote off the arm of the couch before Lincoln could get to it. “But since I saved lives today, I get to pick what we watch.”
“No Discovery Channel!” Lincoln ordered.
~*~
Seeing Michael in Fox River, in prison blues, was almost more than Lincoln’s heart could withstand. When he said his brother’s name, his breath cut off and nothing else would come out except a small, painful, “Why?” He hadn’t seen Michael in months, and though that hurt, that he hadn’t come to visit him, it had also been a strange relief. He hated seeing the sorrow on his brother’s face, the disappointment, the inevitability of it all, right there in front of him. He had to deal with it himself, and it only got magnified in his brother’s sad eyes.
Michael’s determination now chased away thoughts of sad eyes. “I’m getting you out of here.”
One of the C.O.’s bellowed, “Burrows! Roll it up, happy hour's over,” as he noticed Lincoln stopped in the middle of the chapel, dumbfounded yet again by Michael’s antics.
Only now, antics was hardly what they were. This was Prison. And this was Michael. And the two should never have met.
“It's impossible,” Lincoln said, and though the words fit into the bizarre conversation he was having with his younger brother, what he really meant was Michael was impossible. He was impossible to fathom, to comprehend. It was impossible that Lincoln wanted to hug him harder than ever in his life and then beat the living shit out of him.
Michael shook his head, and a light blazed in his eyes, stealing any coherent thought from Lincoln. “Not if you designed the place it isn't,” he said before turning and walking swiftly away before the guard could reprimand Lincoln again.
~*~
Sitting in the backseat with Sara would have been awkward if Lincoln hadn’t been silently applauding her locking Kellerman out of the car as they sped away from what would hopefully be their last crime scene. But it must have felt as good for her to push that lock down as it had been for Lincoln to beat the hell out of the little company lackey that had been threatening Henry Pope. Lincoln decided she might be a good match for Michael after all, since she’d done that with hardly a thought. One of them had to be impulsive, at least some of the time.
As Michael turned the car into Pope’s driveway, the atmosphere subtley changed. Sara clenched her fingers together and the look that the ex-warden gave Michael through the car door window after he got out made the hair on the back of Lincoln’s neck stand up.
“What’s going on?” Lincoln asked, though deep inside him, he knew he wanted to scream, Don’t tell me, don’t tell me what crazy thing you’ve done now, Michael.
Michael’s voice was quietly resigned when he said, “I made a deal with Pope.”
Lincoln climbed out of the jeep with his brother, staring hard at the back of Michael’s head, wishing he could bore right through the skull and understand what went on inside that brain. “You made a deal with Pope? What kind of deal?” he asked, following him around the front of the car.
Michael sighed heavily before answering. “If he came with us, and we got what we needed, I said I’d turn myself in.”
The thought that his chest might really explode this time crossed Lincoln’s mind as the word “What!?” burst out of his mouth. “We don’t even know what this thing is! It could be nothin’, Michael!” He turned an accusatory glare on Sara, who had also emerged from the car, but stood silently behind her opened door. “You know about this?” he demanded, glaring at her.
“Not until it came out of his mouth,” Sara responded dully. Of course, Lincoln knew it wasn’t her fault; he knew all too well that understanding Michael’s actions or trying to control them were well beyond him, and even the ludicrous idea that a woman could somehow rein that in slapped at Lincoln’s conscience. Michael always had to do shit like this, no matter what the circumstances.
“It’s the only thing I could think of. You two can still finish this. You’ll just have to do it without me,” Michael said and he turned to walk over to where Pope stood, waiting.
“I’m not gonna let you do this, Michael. There’s no coming back from this!” For all the times he’d grinned and bore whatever shit-for-brains idea Michael had had-including getting himself thrown into Fox River-and for all the times he’d told himself he just didn’t understand Michael, those times were over. If he had to, Lincoln would knock Michael out and kill Henry Pope and drag his ass away from this place. This place could be their last crime scene, for all that Lincoln cared. He wasn’t leaving his brother here. He wasn’t letting his brother surrender.
Maybe the murderous look on his face was enough to convince Henry Pope, or maybe whatever was on the tape had finally convinced the old man of their innocence, but when Michael walked slowly back to the car, his crazy idea thwarted by an unexpected ally, Lincoln jumped in the jeep and started it. He backed the car down the driveway, biting his tongue the whole time not to rip Michael a new one for another moment of insanity. Instead, he just drove without speaking, following Sara’s muted directions with his hands clamped on the steering wheel.
After she went into the hotel to rent them a room, promising to call the cell phone when she was safely inside, Lincoln still refrained from saying anything. He didn’t know why this particular moment had been the proverbial straw to break the camel’s back, why after years of sitting through similar moments with Michael did this one want to make him wring his neck more tightly than all the others, but he did know that as he wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel and felt the lumpy vinyl digging into his palms that it was the last time. It was the last time Michael could ever do something like that without telling Lincoln about it first. So in a tight voice he said, “If you ever-and I mean EVER-do something like that again, I’ll kill you myself. Do you understand?”
He didn’t look at his brother, he didn’t do anything except jump when the cell phone rang out, disrupting the silence in the car. Michael answered the phone with a quiet, “Is it safe? All right, we’ll be up in five minutes.”
He flipped the phone shut and then his hand touched Lincoln’s shoulder. “If this is what Dad thinks it is, I won’t have to.”
“You never have to, Michael. You just do it. And it makes me want to fucking kill you.”
Michael’s fingers squeezed Lincoln’s shoulder while a smile teased at his lips. “Yeah, well, you’ve done a few things in your life that you didn’t need to either. It’s just the way we are.” He opened the car door and slid out, taking his hand away from Lincoln’s body. “It’s too late to change now, don’t you think?”
He slammed the door shut before Lincoln could respond.
~*~
When Lincoln caught up with Sara in Panama City and found out his brother had done it again, he promptly turned and slammed his fist into one of the brick buildings that surrounded them. The only good thing about doing it just then was that he had a doctor with him to repair his bloodied knuckles and commiserate with him on the sadly significant bond they now shared.
But Lincoln refused to be stupified by Michael’s actions anymore. Within ten days, he and Sara had both enlisted the help of everyone they knew that could get Michael out of Sona and within 28 days of that, he was out.
It was then that his behavior flummoxed Lincoln so much that he knew he would have a nervous breakdown, if Michael didn’t have one first. And it wasn’t until Jane said, as he sat with her on the back porch of a bungalow on the beach, “Can’t you just let him be happy?” that he started to understand it wasn’t about him anymore.
He turned his head and pinned her with a stare. “What?” he demanded.
“Michael came out of Sona and chose to be happy, Lincoln. It needs no other explanation than that, don’t you think?” She rubbed a hand gently on his forearm, an action he supposed was designed to soothe him.
“I know bad stuff happened to him in there, and he doesn’t want to talk about it, or-“ he started to rattle off a list of things that he thought Michael ought to be doing in the aftermath of his ordeal, things he’d already said to Jane on numerous occasions, and even once to Michael during a screaming match. But Jane’s fingers against his lips stopped the flow of words.
“Just let him be happy, and relax. Okay? He’s not going to go off and do anything else ‘crazy’ as you put it. He’s content to be here with you, and LJ, and Sara. Lincoln, just breathe. Okay? Just breathe.”
She moved her fingers away from his lips slowly, as though the volcano of words might erupt again. He restrained himself and then looking into her blue eyes, did something he’d seen his brother do hundreds of times during the two weeks he’d been out of Sona. He threaded his fingers through a woman’s hair and pulled her close so her lips met his.
Confound (verb): to perplex or amaze.
Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical;
and no monster should amaze us
if the normal man does not amaze.
~Gilbert K. Chesterton
“How’d’ja fix it?” Lincoln asked, eyeing his 7-year-old brother warily.
“I took it apart,” Michael replied matter-of-factly. “Two wires inside had come loose. I just tightened the screws they were under.”
Lincoln shook the transistor radio, but it did nothing to stop the sound coming softly from the speaker. “You’re lyin’,” he accused.
“Linc,” Michael said in exasperation, snatching the radio from his older brother’s hand. “It works, doesn’t it? How else do you explain it?”
“You got Mom to fix it,” Lincoln offered, drawing his brows down over his blue eyes in a frown as he watched Michael fiddling with the dial on the radio.
“You know Momma would never help me fix it. She was glad it broke so we couldn’t sneak listening to Cubs’ games anymore.” Michael raised his head so that their eyes met as he got the radio on the right station that broadcast the baseball games they had not been able to listen to for the last week.
Lincoln didn’t respond, because this was very true, and he knew they would have to be careful that their mother didn’t find the repaired radio. But it still seemed impossible that his brother, who was almost five years younger than him, could have fixed it. Michael was too little to keep from losing his lunch money every day to older, bigger, meaner boys unless Lincoln was there to step in, but he could fix a radio, just by taking the plastic backing off and messing with the insides?
Of course, that was what it would have been if Lincoln had taken the plastic backing off-messing with it. Michael taking it off was…different. Lincoln couldn’t understand how his brother had done it, but as they snuggled under the pillows in their shared bed so their mother couldn’t hear the radio, and the Cubs scored a run, he wrapped an arm around Michael, hugging him.
“What’re you doin’?” Michael whispered, squirming closer.
“I can’t hear it very good,” Lincoln lied, laying his head on Michael’s shoulder.
“Can you hear it now?” Michael asked, pushing the radio closer to Lincoln’s ear.
“Yeah, Mikey. I can hear it just fine.”
~*~
“You’re shittin’ me!” Lincoln tried to hold his laughter in, but it was impossible. As Michael’s tale escalated about how he saved his chemistry class from third degree burns due to a mistake by the teacher, it had gotten funnier and funnier.
“Stop laughing, Linc,” Michael wailed, his disposition more dejected than bragging, which was what Linc would have been doing if he’d been Michael. Lincoln couldn’t understand why his little brother wasn’t more proud of his incredible brain, and the fact that a chemistry experiment had been kept from going terribly awry by his swift intervention.
Lincoln had fallen to the couch in their apartment, holding his belly as he continued to laugh, but something in Michael’s tone reached out and wrapped around his mind, and he knew that while it appeared to be the funniest thing ever, something bad had followed Michael’s amazing save. “What is it?” he asked, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes.
“I got sent to the principal’s office after that, and they would have called you, but I told ‘em you weren’t home anyway. They suspended me for two days.” Michael’s head hung morosely.
Sitting up suddenly, Lincoln demanded, “What?! What the hell? You saved the school from burning down, and they suspended you? What for?”
“For disrespecting Mr. Ford, my chemistry teacher and being disruptive in class,” Michael said sadly.
“Oh, give me a fuckin’ break!” Lincoln exclaimed. “I’ll go down there and give them what for, Michael. That’s ridiculous. If it wasn’t for you-“
“I didn’t realize how bad it was until you started laughing about it. No wonder, he must have been humiliated,” Michael interrupted.
“Who was humiliated? Your stupid chem teacher who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing? He deserves to be humiliated. If the 15-year-old in his class can teach better than he can? Yeah, he fucking deserves to be humiliated.”
Michael started shaking his head quickly. “No, Linc, that’s not right,” he said earnestly. “Mr. Ford just got his chemicals confused. He didn’t mean for it to happen. And I shouldn’t have jumped up and pushed my way in like I did. I should have handled it differently.”
“Michael, you are too fucking nice for your own good. You don’t deserve to be suspended.” As Lincoln looked at his younger brother, his heart swelled in remembrance of their mother, who had been dead for more than four years; it wasn’t a good thing that he was so profusely reminded of her by Michael and his screwy sense of compassion. It was too much. And in a world that would kick your ass all too quickly if you turned your back on it, Lincoln worried incessantly for his little brother. “I’ll go down there and talk to the principal,” he offered. “I won’t cuss him out or anything, I’ll just explain that you were trying to help-“
“No, Linc. I think it would be better if I don’t go to school for the two days. I’ll just keep up on all my homework, and it won’t hurt my grades or anything. And maybe then Mr. Ford won’t be mad at me when I go back to his class.”
“Oh, screw that. You aren’t going back to his class,” Lincoln said emphatically. When Michael’s wide eyes pivoted to him, Lincoln raised a hand to silence his brother. “You want to accept the punishment, fine. But you aren’t going back to that class. You did the right thing. I’ll back you up on this crazy-Mr.-Nice-Guy thing, but only if you get out of that asshole’s class.”
“Linc…” Michael’s voice wobbled and Lincoln was sure he saw tears in his brother’s colorful eyes.
“It’s either this, or I go down there and raise hell about the suspension.” Lincoln crossed his arms over his chest, the universal Burrows/Scofield signal for I’m not backing down.
Michael blinked rapidly, slowly gaining control over his emotions. Then he nodded briefly. “If you think it’s for the best,” he said, capitulating to his brother.
Lincoln eyed him suspiciously. “You think by agreeing with me, you’re not humiliating me, huh?” he asked, reaching out to wrap his hand around Michael’s elbow to pull him down on the couch next to him.
A small smile touched Michael’s face. “You’re the boss, Linc,” he said, shooting a sidelong glance at his brother.
“You’re a little shit, you know that?” Lincoln asked as he reached for the remote.
“Yeah, I know,” Michael agreed, snatching the remote off the arm of the couch before Lincoln could get to it. “But since I saved lives today, I get to pick what we watch.”
“No Discovery Channel!” Lincoln ordered.
~*~
Seeing Michael in Fox River, in prison blues, was almost more than Lincoln’s heart could withstand. When he said his brother’s name, his breath cut off and nothing else would come out except a small, painful, “Why?” He hadn’t seen Michael in months, and though that hurt, that he hadn’t come to visit him, it had also been a strange relief. He hated seeing the sorrow on his brother’s face, the disappointment, the inevitability of it all, right there in front of him. He had to deal with it himself, and it only got magnified in his brother’s sad eyes.
Michael’s determination now chased away thoughts of sad eyes. “I’m getting you out of here.”
One of the C.O.’s bellowed, “Burrows! Roll it up, happy hour's over,” as he noticed Lincoln stopped in the middle of the chapel, dumbfounded yet again by Michael’s antics.
Only now, antics was hardly what they were. This was Prison. And this was Michael. And the two should never have met.
“It's impossible,” Lincoln said, and though the words fit into the bizarre conversation he was having with his younger brother, what he really meant was Michael was impossible. He was impossible to fathom, to comprehend. It was impossible that Lincoln wanted to hug him harder than ever in his life and then beat the living shit out of him.
Michael shook his head, and a light blazed in his eyes, stealing any coherent thought from Lincoln. “Not if you designed the place it isn't,” he said before turning and walking swiftly away before the guard could reprimand Lincoln again.
~*~
Sitting in the backseat with Sara would have been awkward if Lincoln hadn’t been silently applauding her locking Kellerman out of the car as they sped away from what would hopefully be their last crime scene. But it must have felt as good for her to push that lock down as it had been for Lincoln to beat the hell out of the little company lackey that had been threatening Henry Pope. Lincoln decided she might be a good match for Michael after all, since she’d done that with hardly a thought. One of them had to be impulsive, at least some of the time.
As Michael turned the car into Pope’s driveway, the atmosphere subtley changed. Sara clenched her fingers together and the look that the ex-warden gave Michael through the car door window after he got out made the hair on the back of Lincoln’s neck stand up.
“What’s going on?” Lincoln asked, though deep inside him, he knew he wanted to scream, Don’t tell me, don’t tell me what crazy thing you’ve done now, Michael.
Michael’s voice was quietly resigned when he said, “I made a deal with Pope.”
Lincoln climbed out of the jeep with his brother, staring hard at the back of Michael’s head, wishing he could bore right through the skull and understand what went on inside that brain. “You made a deal with Pope? What kind of deal?” he asked, following him around the front of the car.
Michael sighed heavily before answering. “If he came with us, and we got what we needed, I said I’d turn myself in.”
The thought that his chest might really explode this time crossed Lincoln’s mind as the word “What!?” burst out of his mouth. “We don’t even know what this thing is! It could be nothin’, Michael!” He turned an accusatory glare on Sara, who had also emerged from the car, but stood silently behind her opened door. “You know about this?” he demanded, glaring at her.
“Not until it came out of his mouth,” Sara responded dully. Of course, Lincoln knew it wasn’t her fault; he knew all too well that understanding Michael’s actions or trying to control them were well beyond him, and even the ludicrous idea that a woman could somehow rein that in slapped at Lincoln’s conscience. Michael always had to do shit like this, no matter what the circumstances.
“It’s the only thing I could think of. You two can still finish this. You’ll just have to do it without me,” Michael said and he turned to walk over to where Pope stood, waiting.
“I’m not gonna let you do this, Michael. There’s no coming back from this!” For all the times he’d grinned and bore whatever shit-for-brains idea Michael had had-including getting himself thrown into Fox River-and for all the times he’d told himself he just didn’t understand Michael, those times were over. If he had to, Lincoln would knock Michael out and kill Henry Pope and drag his ass away from this place. This place could be their last crime scene, for all that Lincoln cared. He wasn’t leaving his brother here. He wasn’t letting his brother surrender.
Maybe the murderous look on his face was enough to convince Henry Pope, or maybe whatever was on the tape had finally convinced the old man of their innocence, but when Michael walked slowly back to the car, his crazy idea thwarted by an unexpected ally, Lincoln jumped in the jeep and started it. He backed the car down the driveway, biting his tongue the whole time not to rip Michael a new one for another moment of insanity. Instead, he just drove without speaking, following Sara’s muted directions with his hands clamped on the steering wheel.
After she went into the hotel to rent them a room, promising to call the cell phone when she was safely inside, Lincoln still refrained from saying anything. He didn’t know why this particular moment had been the proverbial straw to break the camel’s back, why after years of sitting through similar moments with Michael did this one want to make him wring his neck more tightly than all the others, but he did know that as he wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel and felt the lumpy vinyl digging into his palms that it was the last time. It was the last time Michael could ever do something like that without telling Lincoln about it first. So in a tight voice he said, “If you ever-and I mean EVER-do something like that again, I’ll kill you myself. Do you understand?”
He didn’t look at his brother, he didn’t do anything except jump when the cell phone rang out, disrupting the silence in the car. Michael answered the phone with a quiet, “Is it safe? All right, we’ll be up in five minutes.”
He flipped the phone shut and then his hand touched Lincoln’s shoulder. “If this is what Dad thinks it is, I won’t have to.”
“You never have to, Michael. You just do it. And it makes me want to fucking kill you.”
Michael’s fingers squeezed Lincoln’s shoulder while a smile teased at his lips. “Yeah, well, you’ve done a few things in your life that you didn’t need to either. It’s just the way we are.” He opened the car door and slid out, taking his hand away from Lincoln’s body. “It’s too late to change now, don’t you think?”
He slammed the door shut before Lincoln could respond.
~*~
When Lincoln caught up with Sara in Panama City and found out his brother had done it again, he promptly turned and slammed his fist into one of the brick buildings that surrounded them. The only good thing about doing it just then was that he had a doctor with him to repair his bloodied knuckles and commiserate with him on the sadly significant bond they now shared.
But Lincoln refused to be stupified by Michael’s actions anymore. Within ten days, he and Sara had both enlisted the help of everyone they knew that could get Michael out of Sona and within 28 days of that, he was out.
It was then that his behavior flummoxed Lincoln so much that he knew he would have a nervous breakdown, if Michael didn’t have one first. And it wasn’t until Jane said, as he sat with her on the back porch of a bungalow on the beach, “Can’t you just let him be happy?” that he started to understand it wasn’t about him anymore.
He turned his head and pinned her with a stare. “What?” he demanded.
“Michael came out of Sona and chose to be happy, Lincoln. It needs no other explanation than that, don’t you think?” She rubbed a hand gently on his forearm, an action he supposed was designed to soothe him.
“I know bad stuff happened to him in there, and he doesn’t want to talk about it, or-“ he started to rattle off a list of things that he thought Michael ought to be doing in the aftermath of his ordeal, things he’d already said to Jane on numerous occasions, and even once to Michael during a screaming match. But Jane’s fingers against his lips stopped the flow of words.
“Just let him be happy, and relax. Okay? He’s not going to go off and do anything else ‘crazy’ as you put it. He’s content to be here with you, and LJ, and Sara. Lincoln, just breathe. Okay? Just breathe.”
She moved her fingers away from his lips slowly, as though the volcano of words might erupt again. He restrained himself and then looking into her blue eyes, did something he’d seen his brother do hundreds of times during the two weeks he’d been out of Sona. He threaded his fingers through a woman’s hair and pulled her close so her lips met his.