Seven (2/7)
Title: Seven
Author: wrldpossibility
Characters: Sara Tancredi (primarily), Michael Jr., Lincoln Burrows, mention of Michael Scofield, ensemble
Chapter: 2/7, Denial
Word Count: 1950
Rating: R for one profanity
Warning: Yes, still sad.
Spoilers: For the series.
Summary: A lot can happen in four years...
Author's Note: Some lines taken from canon (you'll know which ones). In case anyone is not aware (although I imagine everyone is), I'm writing this in tandem with rosie_spleen. We will be posting mirroring chapters throughout; keep an eye out for her Chapter 2 in a day or so! Many thanks as well to linzi20, who is much more than just a beta. The shiny banner was made by the lovely and talented lauratnz.
Chapter 2
Denial
“How like a winter hath my absence been.” --Shakespeare, Sonnet 97
Spring opens Cristóbal like a flower, shutter by shutter, door by door.
One moment, storms are still darkening the sky in rolling waves, the harbor battered with rain and salt spray, and the next, the sea is the color and texture of beach glass, broken only by the occasional sailboat or yacht taken out for the day by hire. For a country along the equator, the difference between seasons is as startling as night to day.
At least it seems so to Sara. After months of indifference to being buffeted from all sides, she wakes up one morning in early March to soft sunlight pooling on her pillow. Instead of burying her head under her duvet to seek further oblivion in sleep, she looks out her window at a glorious day, and she rises. In hindsight, it seems so simple: get up, look around you, care. She supposes it’s how most people manage their days. It’s certainly how she had, once upon a time not so long ago.
She stands in the doorway of her small house and watches a neighbor back a work truck out of his drive, and marvels at her ability to actually forget what it feels like to arise with an agenda. A purpose. A plan.
So she makes a new one. This one--finally--involves buying a bassinet and baby clothes and even a colonial-era rocking chair she finds in Vista Alegre and inexplicably falls in love with. She stocks up on diapers and even allows the abuelas in the market to press upon her which herbs are good for colic and which are good for lactation. She walks home carting primrose oil and St. John’s Wart and harboring grave doubt that any of the contents of the little jars in her bag will come anywhere near herself or her child, but the unsolicited attention’s left her smiling, all the same. The baby isn’t due for several weeks, but somehow she knows--without knowing how she knows--that he will come early.
*****
She’s wrong.
A week before her due date, she’s still decidedly pregnant, and none of the signs of impending labor, not one of them, have manifested itself.
She walks the beach in the mornings, averting her gaze from the occasional tourist strolling hand-in-hand and smiling instead at the locals motoring fishing boats to the shore or casting nets from the outcroppings of rock. In the evenings, she calls Lincoln to check in, and then turns on the TV in hope that something will hold her attention, and when nothing invariably does, she slips in Michael’s DVD instead and hits play.
And as will happen when one has watched the same thing too many times to count, Sara’s focus becomes slowly diverted from the center to the periphery. She has Michael’s words memorized, so she stops listening to them. Training her eyes instead on his face, his hands, and the hazy background behind him, she tries to add the sum of all these parts.
She doesn’t know what she’s looking for until she’s probably seen it a dozen times. His eyes, she realizes, are not making contact with the viewer; he’s not looking squarely into the camera. And his hands are restless…not exactly tapping, but stirring occasionally against the plane of his thigh. And it hits her: she’s seen this before. She’s studied it before, in haste, in a public library when she was scared and alone.
Just like now.
And she allows herself to think--just briefly at first in a hint of a thought no greater than the sliver of light under a crack in a door--that maybe he’s sending her a message.
Maybe, One day? Or maybe just, Things are not always what they seem.
After that, when she watches the video, she hears only one thing:
Wait for me.
*****
When she rolls up at the dive shack before eight am the next morning, Lincoln immediately assumes she’s there about the baby. He bursts from the house with the screen door crashing shut behind him. “What are you doing? I’m supposed to come to you!”
She shakes her head, still standing by her car, and watches his shoulders slump. “It’s not time?” He slows, then gestures back toward the house. “Want breakfast?”
She does. She wants to follow him inside and take a plate of plantains from Sofia, because that would mean this conversation was already over. Instead, she forges ahead. “Lincoln,” she says, and the gravity of her tone must resonate, because his expression slides from anticipation to outright caution. “There’s something I’ve been thinking about, and I think I need to say it aloud to hear how it sounds.”
*****
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
She stands silent and lets him rail…at least for a moment. She’s never been afraid of his temper, but she’s never had much patience for it, either.
She folds her arms across her chest and leans back against the side of her car, already warm from the sun. “I may well be,” she concedes, and she can tell that her composure is as grating to him as his agitation is to her.
“You’re in denial,” he tells her, latching upon this concept like he‘s the first to ever identify it. “You’re in flat-out, crazy, out-of-control denial, Sara!”
“Maybe,” she repeats softly, and watches him swivel away from her in frustration, hands in the air. “He thought I was dead once,” she reminds him. “You thought I was dead once. We’ve all been fooled before.”
For a second, this observation seems to give him pause, but then he’s shaking his head, advancing upon her as though he’s going to force his opinion right down her throat. “But you’re saying Michael’s the one fooling us this time. And he would not do that.”
“Linc--”
“He would not do that!”
“Your father did.” She amends this swiftly. “Aldo did.” She hesitates. “Christina did.”
“Exactly!” He’s looking at her like she’s suddenly pulled a gun and leveled it at him. “What’s wrong with you? It‘s like I don‘t even know you.”
She can‘t help but think that might be because he‘s never been on the receiving end of Michael‘s deception. But she has. She has.
Was it all a lie?
At first, yes.
Lincoln’s taking a sucking breath, his teeth still on-edge. “You have to keep it together,” he tells her. He rests one hand on her arm, his voice softening. “You’ve been doing so well.”
You gave up everything for me once. Now it's time to say thank you.
She shakes Linc off. “No I haven’t! I haven’t been doing anything at all but bury my head in the sand!” She flails her arm toward the beach stretched out before them. “Literally!”
But he won’t be persuaded. Driving back home, Sara wonders if she had even expected him to be. After all, personal sacrifice and self-misery for the sake of idealism or valor or love or some misguided mixture of all three has long been her and Michael’s M.O., not Lincoln’s.
Never Lincoln’s.
*****
Labor begins with the hard knot of Sara’s belly tightening once, then twice, and then quickly--very quickly--progressing to a swift undertow of pain that pulls her down again, and again, and again.
By the time Lincoln has arrived, she can barely keep her head above water; ensconced in her own room at the private hospital in Cristóbal, tendrils of panic are gripping her like a band, constricting with a force she hadn’t reckoned with.
She’d had this planned. It was meant to take hours. She had intended to walk, and drink water, and work through the pain, one anticipated contraction at a time. Instead, she’s tensing when she knows she’s supposed to be breathing, doubling over on the narrow bed instead of pacing, and she hasn’t heard a word Lincoln or the nurses have said for the better part of an hour.
She hasn’t felt this out of control since standing bound by rope, at the mercy of a whip. Just like then, relief is not offered. This time, however, it‘s not desired; the inability to provide much more than cool compresses and massage in the way of pain management is one thing Sara appreciates about Panamanian health care.
Her midwife speaks to her in slow, simplistic Spanish, for her benefit. Her voice is soft and calm in contrast to Lincoln’s rising English, and at some point, a nurse takes him outside to sit on the long, worn bench in the grimy industrial-white hallway. Sara knows she’s an anomaly; she knows the staff wonders what an American woman is doing here, giving birth in their rural hospital. Wonders who her brother-in-law thinks he is, assuming he can sit in on the birth of a widowed mother.
But by the time she’s fully dilated, all the details she had thought would matter, don’t. She doesn’t care what the duela warming swaddling blankets thinks of her, and
she doesn’t care what they do and do not have on-hand to stick in an IV. She doesn’t care what time it is, or what day it is, or who is in the room with her.
She only cares about who isn’t.
“Descansa un momento,” the midwife tells her--Rest a moment--and in the space of a steadying breath, the earth beneath her stops spinning and the fact that Michael is not here hits her like the weight of the world.
Their child will be born in minutes, seconds, perhaps, and she will be alone, starting from his very first breath. Suddenly, she’s floundering as though on an open sea, bending under another contraction as she grasps at the bed rails as though they were hands extended. It doesn’t matter; she’s still drowning. Who had she been fooling? How exactly did she think she was going to make any of this work?
Michael J. Scofield, Jr. is born in a gasping break between sobs. The moment his newborn wail hits her ears, Sara bites back her own.
The first sound he hears in this world is not going to be his mother crying.
*****
For the remainder of March, Lincoln is a near-permanent fixture in Sara’s small house. He can’t get enough of Michael, Jr., and Sara has to admit that the few times she wishes for her own space are vastly outnumbered by the dozens of times she’s grateful for his presence.
With April arrives an increase in business at the scuba shop, and he’s forced to cut his daily visits to tri-weekly ones. By May, he’s so swamped with business, he and LJ are working twelve-hour days, and sometimes, Sara will go a full week speaking to them only on the phone.
When she does see them, they look suntanned and tired and happy, and it’s good, because she tells herself she needs time alone with her son. It’s high time she learns to sink or swim on her own.
The trouble is, she’s not always convinced that she’ll have to. She refrains from mentioning it to Lincoln again, but Michael’s recording nags at her whenever fatigue and loneliness bring her psychological guard down, which is pretty much all the time. As she walks through a haze of days and nights that carry her into the summer, she realizes she’s still serving time, albeit to two masters: on the fingers of one hand, she’s micromanaging every minute of every day, counting out the hours between feedings and diaper changes and waking periods.
On the other, indeterminable weeks, months, and even years stretch out before her, empty save for this slightest glimmer of doubt which she nurtures within her.
It takes all her new-found maternal instinct to keep it alive.
Author: wrldpossibility
Characters: Sara Tancredi (primarily), Michael Jr., Lincoln Burrows, mention of Michael Scofield, ensemble
Chapter: 2/7, Denial
Word Count: 1950
Rating: R for one profanity
Warning: Yes, still sad.
Spoilers: For the series.
Summary: A lot can happen in four years...
Author's Note: Some lines taken from canon (you'll know which ones). In case anyone is not aware (although I imagine everyone is), I'm writing this in tandem with rosie_spleen. We will be posting mirroring chapters throughout; keep an eye out for her Chapter 2 in a day or so! Many thanks as well to linzi20, who is much more than just a beta. The shiny banner was made by the lovely and talented lauratnz.
Chapter 2
Denial
“How like a winter hath my absence been.” --Shakespeare, Sonnet 97
Spring opens Cristóbal like a flower, shutter by shutter, door by door.
One moment, storms are still darkening the sky in rolling waves, the harbor battered with rain and salt spray, and the next, the sea is the color and texture of beach glass, broken only by the occasional sailboat or yacht taken out for the day by hire. For a country along the equator, the difference between seasons is as startling as night to day.
At least it seems so to Sara. After months of indifference to being buffeted from all sides, she wakes up one morning in early March to soft sunlight pooling on her pillow. Instead of burying her head under her duvet to seek further oblivion in sleep, she looks out her window at a glorious day, and she rises. In hindsight, it seems so simple: get up, look around you, care. She supposes it’s how most people manage their days. It’s certainly how she had, once upon a time not so long ago.
She stands in the doorway of her small house and watches a neighbor back a work truck out of his drive, and marvels at her ability to actually forget what it feels like to arise with an agenda. A purpose. A plan.
So she makes a new one. This one--finally--involves buying a bassinet and baby clothes and even a colonial-era rocking chair she finds in Vista Alegre and inexplicably falls in love with. She stocks up on diapers and even allows the abuelas in the market to press upon her which herbs are good for colic and which are good for lactation. She walks home carting primrose oil and St. John’s Wart and harboring grave doubt that any of the contents of the little jars in her bag will come anywhere near herself or her child, but the unsolicited attention’s left her smiling, all the same. The baby isn’t due for several weeks, but somehow she knows--without knowing how she knows--that he will come early.
*****
She’s wrong.
A week before her due date, she’s still decidedly pregnant, and none of the signs of impending labor, not one of them, have manifested itself.
She walks the beach in the mornings, averting her gaze from the occasional tourist strolling hand-in-hand and smiling instead at the locals motoring fishing boats to the shore or casting nets from the outcroppings of rock. In the evenings, she calls Lincoln to check in, and then turns on the TV in hope that something will hold her attention, and when nothing invariably does, she slips in Michael’s DVD instead and hits play.
And as will happen when one has watched the same thing too many times to count, Sara’s focus becomes slowly diverted from the center to the periphery. She has Michael’s words memorized, so she stops listening to them. Training her eyes instead on his face, his hands, and the hazy background behind him, she tries to add the sum of all these parts.
She doesn’t know what she’s looking for until she’s probably seen it a dozen times. His eyes, she realizes, are not making contact with the viewer; he’s not looking squarely into the camera. And his hands are restless…not exactly tapping, but stirring occasionally against the plane of his thigh. And it hits her: she’s seen this before. She’s studied it before, in haste, in a public library when she was scared and alone.
Just like now.
And she allows herself to think--just briefly at first in a hint of a thought no greater than the sliver of light under a crack in a door--that maybe he’s sending her a message.
Maybe, One day? Or maybe just, Things are not always what they seem.
After that, when she watches the video, she hears only one thing:
Wait for me.
*****
When she rolls up at the dive shack before eight am the next morning, Lincoln immediately assumes she’s there about the baby. He bursts from the house with the screen door crashing shut behind him. “What are you doing? I’m supposed to come to you!”
She shakes her head, still standing by her car, and watches his shoulders slump. “It’s not time?” He slows, then gestures back toward the house. “Want breakfast?”
She does. She wants to follow him inside and take a plate of plantains from Sofia, because that would mean this conversation was already over. Instead, she forges ahead. “Lincoln,” she says, and the gravity of her tone must resonate, because his expression slides from anticipation to outright caution. “There’s something I’ve been thinking about, and I think I need to say it aloud to hear how it sounds.”
*****
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
She stands silent and lets him rail…at least for a moment. She’s never been afraid of his temper, but she’s never had much patience for it, either.
She folds her arms across her chest and leans back against the side of her car, already warm from the sun. “I may well be,” she concedes, and she can tell that her composure is as grating to him as his agitation is to her.
“You’re in denial,” he tells her, latching upon this concept like he‘s the first to ever identify it. “You’re in flat-out, crazy, out-of-control denial, Sara!”
“Maybe,” she repeats softly, and watches him swivel away from her in frustration, hands in the air. “He thought I was dead once,” she reminds him. “You thought I was dead once. We’ve all been fooled before.”
For a second, this observation seems to give him pause, but then he’s shaking his head, advancing upon her as though he’s going to force his opinion right down her throat. “But you’re saying Michael’s the one fooling us this time. And he would not do that.”
“Linc--”
“He would not do that!”
“Your father did.” She amends this swiftly. “Aldo did.” She hesitates. “Christina did.”
“Exactly!” He’s looking at her like she’s suddenly pulled a gun and leveled it at him. “What’s wrong with you? It‘s like I don‘t even know you.”
She can‘t help but think that might be because he‘s never been on the receiving end of Michael‘s deception. But she has. She has.
Was it all a lie?
At first, yes.
Lincoln’s taking a sucking breath, his teeth still on-edge. “You have to keep it together,” he tells her. He rests one hand on her arm, his voice softening. “You’ve been doing so well.”
You gave up everything for me once. Now it's time to say thank you.
She shakes Linc off. “No I haven’t! I haven’t been doing anything at all but bury my head in the sand!” She flails her arm toward the beach stretched out before them. “Literally!”
But he won’t be persuaded. Driving back home, Sara wonders if she had even expected him to be. After all, personal sacrifice and self-misery for the sake of idealism or valor or love or some misguided mixture of all three has long been her and Michael’s M.O., not Lincoln’s.
Never Lincoln’s.
*****
Labor begins with the hard knot of Sara’s belly tightening once, then twice, and then quickly--very quickly--progressing to a swift undertow of pain that pulls her down again, and again, and again.
By the time Lincoln has arrived, she can barely keep her head above water; ensconced in her own room at the private hospital in Cristóbal, tendrils of panic are gripping her like a band, constricting with a force she hadn’t reckoned with.
She’d had this planned. It was meant to take hours. She had intended to walk, and drink water, and work through the pain, one anticipated contraction at a time. Instead, she’s tensing when she knows she’s supposed to be breathing, doubling over on the narrow bed instead of pacing, and she hasn’t heard a word Lincoln or the nurses have said for the better part of an hour.
She hasn’t felt this out of control since standing bound by rope, at the mercy of a whip. Just like then, relief is not offered. This time, however, it‘s not desired; the inability to provide much more than cool compresses and massage in the way of pain management is one thing Sara appreciates about Panamanian health care.
Her midwife speaks to her in slow, simplistic Spanish, for her benefit. Her voice is soft and calm in contrast to Lincoln’s rising English, and at some point, a nurse takes him outside to sit on the long, worn bench in the grimy industrial-white hallway. Sara knows she’s an anomaly; she knows the staff wonders what an American woman is doing here, giving birth in their rural hospital. Wonders who her brother-in-law thinks he is, assuming he can sit in on the birth of a widowed mother.
But by the time she’s fully dilated, all the details she had thought would matter, don’t. She doesn’t care what the duela warming swaddling blankets thinks of her, and
she doesn’t care what they do and do not have on-hand to stick in an IV. She doesn’t care what time it is, or what day it is, or who is in the room with her.
She only cares about who isn’t.
“Descansa un momento,” the midwife tells her--Rest a moment--and in the space of a steadying breath, the earth beneath her stops spinning and the fact that Michael is not here hits her like the weight of the world.
Their child will be born in minutes, seconds, perhaps, and she will be alone, starting from his very first breath. Suddenly, she’s floundering as though on an open sea, bending under another contraction as she grasps at the bed rails as though they were hands extended. It doesn’t matter; she’s still drowning. Who had she been fooling? How exactly did she think she was going to make any of this work?
Michael J. Scofield, Jr. is born in a gasping break between sobs. The moment his newborn wail hits her ears, Sara bites back her own.
The first sound he hears in this world is not going to be his mother crying.
*****
For the remainder of March, Lincoln is a near-permanent fixture in Sara’s small house. He can’t get enough of Michael, Jr., and Sara has to admit that the few times she wishes for her own space are vastly outnumbered by the dozens of times she’s grateful for his presence.
With April arrives an increase in business at the scuba shop, and he’s forced to cut his daily visits to tri-weekly ones. By May, he’s so swamped with business, he and LJ are working twelve-hour days, and sometimes, Sara will go a full week speaking to them only on the phone.
When she does see them, they look suntanned and tired and happy, and it’s good, because she tells herself she needs time alone with her son. It’s high time she learns to sink or swim on her own.
The trouble is, she’s not always convinced that she’ll have to. She refrains from mentioning it to Lincoln again, but Michael’s recording nags at her whenever fatigue and loneliness bring her psychological guard down, which is pretty much all the time. As she walks through a haze of days and nights that carry her into the summer, she realizes she’s still serving time, albeit to two masters: on the fingers of one hand, she’s micromanaging every minute of every day, counting out the hours between feedings and diaper changes and waking periods.
On the other, indeterminable weeks, months, and even years stretch out before her, empty save for this slightest glimmer of doubt which she nurtures within her.
It takes all her new-found maternal instinct to keep it alive.