Four Moments in Time Jane Will Always Remember
Title: Four Moments in Time Jane Will Always Remember
Author: happywriter06
Fandom: Prison Break
Rating: PG
Category: Gen (Pre-series)
Characters: Jane Phillips, Aldo Burrows
Disclaimer: If I owned Prison Break, Jane would be present.
Warning: Spoilers for S2 up to Bolshoi Booze.
Notes: I wrote this sometime after Bolshoi Booze. Just never got around to posting it.
One
Jane remembers the one and only time her father ever told her he loved her. Up until that point, she never believed he did because he never said it. She has always been the type of person that needs things to be said that way there won’t be any confusion, no guessing, no bullshit. And he never showed it the way she once needed it to be shown. She needed the smiles and the pats on the back.
When he told her, he thought he was going to die. They - her mom, her older sisters, her aunts, her uncles - all thought he was going to die. He said “I love you, Janie” as he was wheeled off into surgery to remove the cancer that was eating him alive. He did not die then. By some miracle he lived. And he never said it again. And she was okay with that.
Two
The first time she got dumped she cold cocked the guy. She does not remember his name. He had said, “If I want to date a guy, I’ll date a real guy.” As she kept her hand in a bowl of ice, she decided that if a guy did not like her tomboy ways, then she was better off without him.
Three
When she felt the bomb go off - because it shook the ground she knelt upon - killing her family, she wished she were dead. The weight of the lost settled unto her shoulders causing her to fall to the ground as if the bones in her body had liquefied. She heard herself make sounds she had never made before. She begged the men dressed in black to kill her. They laughed in her face. They said her time would come soon enough just not today. They drug her to the car - her knees violently scraping the hard earth - and threw her in the trunk face down. The mixture of tears, sweat and blood flowed into her eyes.
They left her on the side of the road with her hands and ankles bound, dirty and broken in every which way. Everything hurt: her head, her wrists, her knees, her chest, her face from the relentless beating of the sun. The sense of lost set up shop in her lungs slowly forcing the life out of her.
She barely heard the truck roll to a halting stop, the door slam and a man’s voice. “Mary, it’s a woman. She’s alive. Barely.” She felt her wrists and ankles being freed. She curled into the fetal position waiting for her life to end. Instead she felt herself being lifted off the ground and carried away.
She awoke to bright lights, beeping, disinfectant and nearly blinding pain. Her throat was raw. It burned to swallow the little bit of saliva she could muster up. She felt the tender stitched up wound on her head. Her chest was bound. She sucked in air through clenched teeth because the pain - a million sharp daggers - in her chest was that great. She felt the bandages on her wrists, her knees, her ankles, and on her left side.
“You gave us quite a scare young lady.” She focused her eyes on the man coming into her room. She pushed herself up and winced. She felt the tears streaming down her face. “Why am I not dead?” She heard the man say, “I’ll get the nurse.”
Her head went back and she cried as the nurse came into the room. “Hello, Jane.” Is that my name? “So glad you are awake. I’m Nurse Williams. Mr. James says you are in pain. Look at me Jane.” Jane complied. “Just push this button to increase your morphine drip, okay?”
“No…drugs,” she managed to get out in a harsh whisper.
“Jane, you have five broken ribs, a lacerated liver, twelve stitches in your head and too many cuts and bruises to count. Don’t be stupid.”
Four
The day Aldo offered her revenge was the day she stopped praying for her own death. She was alone in a hotel room staring at the medications she had been given to numb her to the constant pain of healing wounds and mending bones. Just one or twelve or thirty. A knock at the door broke her suicidal train of thought. She did not bother to look through the peephole. It was not like she was going to fight back if someone was there to kill her. There was Aldo - alive, well and pushing by her to get in. I’m seeing ghosts.
“Jane, I found you.”
“Now forget where. Close the door on your way out,” she said as she walked around him to lie on the bed.
The word revenge cleared the fog and she knew then that she had a reason for living.