Title: Someone Else’s
Author: HalfshellVenus
Characters: Lincoln/Michael (Slash)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Sometimes he feels like his whole life with Lincoln has been spent waiting.
SPOILERS: Season 2, episodes 1-3.
Author’s Notes: Written for
summercon (Michael/anybody) and for
fanfic100 where I have the Slash pairing of Lincoln/Michael (for prompt #42, “Triangle). This is also the expansion of the long-ago
“Stories I Never Wrote You” prompt and ficlet of the same name.
x-x-x-x-x
Sometimes Michael feels like his whole life with Lincoln has been spent waiting.
Waiting for Lincoln to come home in high school (and worrying when he didn’t). Waiting for Lincoln to straighten up and sober up, and live toward a goal instead of the weak promise of the next twenty-four hours.
Waiting for everyone else standing between him and Lincoln to just clear out of the fucking way so he could have more than two minutes where his brother belongs only to him.
There has been a steady, life-long parade of something or someone always dragging Lincoln’s attention away. Girls, booze, girls, drugs, girls, prison, girls, girls. It’s a three-cornered relationship where something else is always winning. For awhile it was LJ, and Michael felt like a jerk being jealous of a baby. But Lincoln moved out to live with Lisa and be LJ’s father, and then never came back home after he with Lisa were through. So maybe Michael’s allowed some bitterness over that, even though it’s awfully petty.
Women have been hanging all over Lincoln as long as Michael can remember, and that never made it any easier to watch. It’s so wrong he would never begin to say it, but each kiss Lincoln gave away always felt like betrayal. Every slow slide of Lincoln’s hands along some girl’s body was a torturous reminder of what Michael would never have, could never ask for… should not even want. He hates this obsession he has with Lincoln, hates that he just can’t let it go. It’s a soul-deep curse that will haunt him the rest of his life.
Veronica got in Michael’s way, over and over. She was there in High School and for some time after, and again in secret when Lincoln was living with Lisa. She just wouldn’t stay gone, and Lincoln kept on letting it happen. Michael was always this third wheel around the two of them, friends with Veronica but jealous of her too. Pretty soon there was no Lincoln-and-Michael that wasn’t really Lincoln/Veronica-and-Michael. She wormed her way into their family and pushed Michael out to the edges, and there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop it no matter how he tried.
She was headed there again near the end, Michael is convinced of it. Coming to see Lincoln on his execution day, declaring her love for him to the world when she’d lost any right to claim him.
She would have found her way into the escape plan, and taken Lincoln for herself all over again.
But she’s gone now, a victim of the conspiracy that targeted Lincoln. She must have stumbled onto something big. They’ll never know what it was.
Michael’s genuinely sorry-- she was his friend, despite both of them wanting the same thing.
But feeling bad isn’t the same as having regrets.
Lying here on the ground with Lincoln curled around him against the cold, Michael can’t help thinking he might finally have the chance that he’s always wanted.
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