Seven (5/7)
Title: Seven
Author: wrldpossibility
Characters: Sara Tancredi (primarily), Michael Jr., Lincoln Burrows, mention of Michael Scofield, ensemble
Chapter: 5/7, Anger
Word Count: 2000
Rating: PG-13
Warning: The usual...I'm going to stop warning you all, I think. ;)
Spoilers: For the series.
Summary: A lot can happen in four years...
Author's Note: Not much in the way of explanation necessary for this chapter. Many thanks, as always, to my Seven partners rosie_spleen and linzi20. The shiny banner was made by the lovely and talented lauratnz.
Chapter 5
Anger
“Come what may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day. --Shakespeare, Macbeth
Paul Kellerman had disclosed nothing.
He had stood stubbornly in place on the bluff of windswept sand above Michael’s memorial site, poker face in place, and had waited patiently for Sara to reach him before offering that odd, semi-smirk that he seems to reserve solely for her and her alone.
She had been unable to curb the sudden hysteria that had arisen in her throat. “You tell me,” she had said, tightly, “right now, what you’re doing here.”
But he had not. Had she really expected him to? Instead, he had fed her a line about closure and his life moving forward, and she had felt disappointment sluice through her in a violent rush, flooding her anger like a thousand cracks in what she had thought was the most impenetrable armor. Until he had dashed them, she hadn’t realized just how fervently she had hoped he had come bearing other news.
As she had walked away, her hands had been shaking and her adrenaline pumping; she had been so furious, she could have thrown a punch through a wall.
“You can blame me if you’d like,” he’d called after her. “You wouldn’t be the first one.”
*****
She will then, thank you.
Because now, a day later, Sara is no further ahead than she had been before: she still knows nothing. She‘s sure of nothing. And she has nothing at her disposal but a few pieces of folded paper and a feeling in her gut.
And she’s can’t go anywhere. She can’t risk leaving the relative sanctity of Panama as a fugitive, can’t risk losing her son, can’t so much as put a toe out of line. She turns in circles, not knowing what to hope for and what to simply accept. She doesn’t know whether Michael is out there somewhere, needing her, or nowhere at all. And she’s stonewalled whenever she breaches the subject: her most captive audience has a vocabulary of 30 words. She might as well live on an island.
And so she treads water. She works. She mothers. She cooks and cleans up and hangs loads of laundry on the line. And for the more menial of these chores, she’s actually grateful, because they give her something to do. Something to grapple with. Something, like today, to wrestle to the ground: she’s currently tugging damp, unwieldy bed sheets from a basket and attempting to fold them single-handedly. She fights them for the better part of a minute before wadding them up in a burst of anger and throwing them--Michael’s crib bedding and a pillowcase or two--across the garden in a furious thrust. And it feels excellent, in an awful, empty sort of way.
When they hit the wooden fence, however, they don’t make even a whisper of a sound. She entertains the possibility that if she continues on in this way, she’ll lose her mind.
*****
It’s another long winter, much like her first.
Too often, her mood continues to match the weather; she’s short tempered, easily roused to anger, swiftly frustrated. She snaps at Michael for ridiculous reasons, she burns things on the stove, she grows stubborn and difficult with Lincoln, going days without initiating a visit or a call.
She’s glad to blame her run-in with Paul, of course.
She realizes now that it must have simply been the sight of anyone from her and Michael’s past that had raised her hopes like a balloon only to pop, but even so, the mounting questions in her mind, coupled with the lack of answers, slowly tear her down, piece by piece, day by day.
The origami keeps coming at semi-regular intervals, striping her further of her defenses until her emotions are left bare and raw like a perpetually fresh, searing burn. One day near his second birthday, Michael receives an intricately folded train in the mail, and then in April, a boat, complete with a sail. He lines them up next to his mostly-crumpled truck and scoots all three of them contentedly across the floor.
There’s something pitiful about it, and often, Sara finds herself frowning. Testily, she offers him other toys: bright building blocks, the latest gadget marketed for toddler development, an expensive tricycle he can’t yet pedal. None of it holds his attention for long.
In May, the humidity closes in on Cristobal like a blanket, leaving her clothes to stick limply against her skin and her hair to lay heavy and dense on the back of her neck.
Her tolerance for such discomforts seems to have reached its end. The very next morning, she walks the half mile to the local beauty salon. The peluquera presiding over the shop, a robust, cheery woman old enough to be Sara’s mother, hesitates when she’s told the number of inches she wants chopped off.
"¿Estás segura?” she frets, lifting the length of Sara‘s hair in her hands and letting it fall. "Tu pelo es tan bello."
She is sure. She has, after all, done it before. She remembers the instant surge of control she‘d experienced in the grungy bathroom while on the run, the reclamation of self. And she’d be lying if she said Kellerman’s resurface hadn’t unnerved her. A heightened sense of caution, a watchful eye…a subtle change to her appearance couldn’t hurt. And a half hour later, when she holds up the hand mirror to survey the tips of her hair now barely brushing her shoulder, she’s pleased.
Somehow, an invisible burden has been shed. A weight has been lifted.
Her rare good mood, however, is short-lived. When she arrives home, Lincoln stares and Michael looks at her as though she’s a stranger.
“Aren’t you the impulsive one.”
She stoops to pick up Michael, who‘s now begun to cry. “It’s only hair.”
Neither of them look convinced. Michael twists in her arms to search her face, clearly trying to identify his mother by her voice alone. She suddenly feels unduly vindictive.
Somewhere over her shoulder, Lincoln offers bracingly, “I think it looks great.” This apparently, sounds as inadequate to him as it does to her, and he adds quietly, “And I’m sure he loved it both ways.”
This second observation carries a ring of significance that causes Sara to look uncertainly from him to her son, whose lip is still quivering. “Who, Michael?“ she asks, distracted by his small hands now reaching for the short strands tucked behind her ear.
Lincoln looks uncomfortable. “Yeah,” he says carefully, but he sounds caught in a lie.
They don‘t experience many of these misunderstandings, but when the do, it‘s always painful. She tries to let it pass, but tears are pricking the back of her eyelids, and after a moment, she shakes her head. “No,” she corrects softly, shame churning her stomach. “He loved it long.”
She turns away irritably, running one hand experimentally through the short length, but by now, her precious happiness with the cut has been sullied. Buyer’s remorse sits heavy on her conscience, and it leaves her wondering who, precisely, she had she been trying to punish with this assault on her appearance.
*****
The summer is one of the hottest on record. By the time September arrives, they’ve fallen into the habit of eating late, Sara and Michael joining Lincoln, LJ, and Sofia at the dive shop for grilled seafood with patacones and tortillas after the sun goes down, the sand finally cool on their feet as Michael chases sea gulls near the foamy surf.
An hour into the first hurricane warning of the season, Sara clears dinner dishes while watching the sky darken with cloud cover, the wind sending a flurry of napkins to rise in the air. Michael is at her side, trying to catch the first spattering of raindrops on his tongue. She thinks nothing of the origami truck clutched in his hand until she reaches for his arm, intent on drawing him away from the deck and toward the car for home. As she does so, the truck falls from his grip and onto the weathered planks at their feet.
Lincoln, emerging from the kitchen, follows the movement with his eyes, then visibly blanches. “Where’d he get that?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Sara, where’d he get that?”
She arranges her face in what she hopes presents a languid calm. She fails; the wind is picking up, whipping her hair against her face and giving her what she imagines is a somewhat harried air. “Why?” she asks carefully.
But his full attention is on the truck. “Let me see that,” he demands, then scoops it up out of Michael’s fingers--he’d been reaching to retrieve it before it became plastered with rainwater--and turns it over in his hands.
“Where’d you get this?” he asks again, and this time, his voice is shaking. Sara sends Michael back into the shelter of the dive shop and turns to face him. Rain stings her cheeks.
She takes a fortifying breath, intending to make every effort to keep her words benign. “Where do you think I got it?”
He reels on the spot as though struck by some unseen blow. “Not this again!”
She holds her ground, gesturing at the origami in his hands. “Then you tell me what you thought when you saw that. You tell me what it means to you!” The wind is a rush in her ears: she has to yell.
Lincoln has no trouble yelling back. “Michael used to make these! Alright? He used to make these, just like this, when we were kids.”
Sara feels something rise in her chest, something that sends her breath from her lungs in a sharp exhale before it becomes lodged like a hard lump in her throat, because he‘s not finished. He holds up the truck in one tight fist. “But all this means is that we’ve got someone playing us! We’ve got someone fucking with us after all this time, and dammit, Sara! That’s something I needed to know!”
She shakes her head, still unable to draw breath, let alone come to her own defense. “Don’t you dare put that on me,” she finally manages, but she’s not even sure he hears her over the wind. She draws the rose from her bag, then the older one that dates all the way back to Fox River, this one decidedly worse for the wear, and challenges him to compare them. “We both know only one person could have made these identically,” she shouts. She knows she sounds frenetic, but she no longer cares. She grapples in her bag for the crane--Lincoln’s crane--with Michael’s words penned on the wing, but he just stares stubbornly at the mess of paper in her hands.
“What am I looking at?” he shouts over the wind. “What are you saying?”
Somewhere behind them, Sara hears LJ calling to them both. Neither of them turn. “I saw Paul Kellerman,” she yells.
He looks doubtful, and she feels the rage that seems to be always smoldering just under the surface of her psyche ignite in a flash. Just like that, she’s transported back five years, having any one of a hundred frustrating, pointless arguments with her father all over again. She‘s squaring off with Michael in the infirmary, betrayal causing her blood to boil. She’s baking in the sun of Butterfield Road, bent double from the pain of loving someone and wanting it to stop. She dripping wet and gasping, telling Kellerman himself to go to hell.
She swipes at the rain falling into her eyes, then turns on her heel and pushes through the blowing sand back to the dive shop to retrieve Michael and go home. She’s never been one to walk away from a fight, but Lincoln is quite nearly all the family she has left.
She’s not sure how many more bridges she has left to burn.
Author: wrldpossibility
Characters: Sara Tancredi (primarily), Michael Jr., Lincoln Burrows, mention of Michael Scofield, ensemble
Chapter: 5/7, Anger
Word Count: 2000
Rating: PG-13
Warning: The usual...I'm going to stop warning you all, I think. ;)
Spoilers: For the series.
Summary: A lot can happen in four years...
Author's Note: Not much in the way of explanation necessary for this chapter. Many thanks, as always, to my Seven partners rosie_spleen and linzi20. The shiny banner was made by the lovely and talented lauratnz.
Chapter 5
Anger
“Come what may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day. --Shakespeare, Macbeth
Paul Kellerman had disclosed nothing.
He had stood stubbornly in place on the bluff of windswept sand above Michael’s memorial site, poker face in place, and had waited patiently for Sara to reach him before offering that odd, semi-smirk that he seems to reserve solely for her and her alone.
She had been unable to curb the sudden hysteria that had arisen in her throat. “You tell me,” she had said, tightly, “right now, what you’re doing here.”
But he had not. Had she really expected him to? Instead, he had fed her a line about closure and his life moving forward, and she had felt disappointment sluice through her in a violent rush, flooding her anger like a thousand cracks in what she had thought was the most impenetrable armor. Until he had dashed them, she hadn’t realized just how fervently she had hoped he had come bearing other news.
As she had walked away, her hands had been shaking and her adrenaline pumping; she had been so furious, she could have thrown a punch through a wall.
“You can blame me if you’d like,” he’d called after her. “You wouldn’t be the first one.”
*****
She will then, thank you.
Because now, a day later, Sara is no further ahead than she had been before: she still knows nothing. She‘s sure of nothing. And she has nothing at her disposal but a few pieces of folded paper and a feeling in her gut.
And she’s can’t go anywhere. She can’t risk leaving the relative sanctity of Panama as a fugitive, can’t risk losing her son, can’t so much as put a toe out of line. She turns in circles, not knowing what to hope for and what to simply accept. She doesn’t know whether Michael is out there somewhere, needing her, or nowhere at all. And she’s stonewalled whenever she breaches the subject: her most captive audience has a vocabulary of 30 words. She might as well live on an island.
And so she treads water. She works. She mothers. She cooks and cleans up and hangs loads of laundry on the line. And for the more menial of these chores, she’s actually grateful, because they give her something to do. Something to grapple with. Something, like today, to wrestle to the ground: she’s currently tugging damp, unwieldy bed sheets from a basket and attempting to fold them single-handedly. She fights them for the better part of a minute before wadding them up in a burst of anger and throwing them--Michael’s crib bedding and a pillowcase or two--across the garden in a furious thrust. And it feels excellent, in an awful, empty sort of way.
When they hit the wooden fence, however, they don’t make even a whisper of a sound. She entertains the possibility that if she continues on in this way, she’ll lose her mind.
*****
It’s another long winter, much like her first.
Too often, her mood continues to match the weather; she’s short tempered, easily roused to anger, swiftly frustrated. She snaps at Michael for ridiculous reasons, she burns things on the stove, she grows stubborn and difficult with Lincoln, going days without initiating a visit or a call.
She’s glad to blame her run-in with Paul, of course.
She realizes now that it must have simply been the sight of anyone from her and Michael’s past that had raised her hopes like a balloon only to pop, but even so, the mounting questions in her mind, coupled with the lack of answers, slowly tear her down, piece by piece, day by day.
The origami keeps coming at semi-regular intervals, striping her further of her defenses until her emotions are left bare and raw like a perpetually fresh, searing burn. One day near his second birthday, Michael receives an intricately folded train in the mail, and then in April, a boat, complete with a sail. He lines them up next to his mostly-crumpled truck and scoots all three of them contentedly across the floor.
There’s something pitiful about it, and often, Sara finds herself frowning. Testily, she offers him other toys: bright building blocks, the latest gadget marketed for toddler development, an expensive tricycle he can’t yet pedal. None of it holds his attention for long.
In May, the humidity closes in on Cristobal like a blanket, leaving her clothes to stick limply against her skin and her hair to lay heavy and dense on the back of her neck.
Her tolerance for such discomforts seems to have reached its end. The very next morning, she walks the half mile to the local beauty salon. The peluquera presiding over the shop, a robust, cheery woman old enough to be Sara’s mother, hesitates when she’s told the number of inches she wants chopped off.
"¿Estás segura?” she frets, lifting the length of Sara‘s hair in her hands and letting it fall. "Tu pelo es tan bello."
She is sure. She has, after all, done it before. She remembers the instant surge of control she‘d experienced in the grungy bathroom while on the run, the reclamation of self. And she’d be lying if she said Kellerman’s resurface hadn’t unnerved her. A heightened sense of caution, a watchful eye…a subtle change to her appearance couldn’t hurt. And a half hour later, when she holds up the hand mirror to survey the tips of her hair now barely brushing her shoulder, she’s pleased.
Somehow, an invisible burden has been shed. A weight has been lifted.
Her rare good mood, however, is short-lived. When she arrives home, Lincoln stares and Michael looks at her as though she’s a stranger.
“Aren’t you the impulsive one.”
She stoops to pick up Michael, who‘s now begun to cry. “It’s only hair.”
Neither of them look convinced. Michael twists in her arms to search her face, clearly trying to identify his mother by her voice alone. She suddenly feels unduly vindictive.
Somewhere over her shoulder, Lincoln offers bracingly, “I think it looks great.” This apparently, sounds as inadequate to him as it does to her, and he adds quietly, “And I’m sure he loved it both ways.”
This second observation carries a ring of significance that causes Sara to look uncertainly from him to her son, whose lip is still quivering. “Who, Michael?“ she asks, distracted by his small hands now reaching for the short strands tucked behind her ear.
Lincoln looks uncomfortable. “Yeah,” he says carefully, but he sounds caught in a lie.
They don‘t experience many of these misunderstandings, but when the do, it‘s always painful. She tries to let it pass, but tears are pricking the back of her eyelids, and after a moment, she shakes her head. “No,” she corrects softly, shame churning her stomach. “He loved it long.”
She turns away irritably, running one hand experimentally through the short length, but by now, her precious happiness with the cut has been sullied. Buyer’s remorse sits heavy on her conscience, and it leaves her wondering who, precisely, she had she been trying to punish with this assault on her appearance.
*****
The summer is one of the hottest on record. By the time September arrives, they’ve fallen into the habit of eating late, Sara and Michael joining Lincoln, LJ, and Sofia at the dive shop for grilled seafood with patacones and tortillas after the sun goes down, the sand finally cool on their feet as Michael chases sea gulls near the foamy surf.
An hour into the first hurricane warning of the season, Sara clears dinner dishes while watching the sky darken with cloud cover, the wind sending a flurry of napkins to rise in the air. Michael is at her side, trying to catch the first spattering of raindrops on his tongue. She thinks nothing of the origami truck clutched in his hand until she reaches for his arm, intent on drawing him away from the deck and toward the car for home. As she does so, the truck falls from his grip and onto the weathered planks at their feet.
Lincoln, emerging from the kitchen, follows the movement with his eyes, then visibly blanches. “Where’d he get that?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Sara, where’d he get that?”
She arranges her face in what she hopes presents a languid calm. She fails; the wind is picking up, whipping her hair against her face and giving her what she imagines is a somewhat harried air. “Why?” she asks carefully.
But his full attention is on the truck. “Let me see that,” he demands, then scoops it up out of Michael’s fingers--he’d been reaching to retrieve it before it became plastered with rainwater--and turns it over in his hands.
“Where’d you get this?” he asks again, and this time, his voice is shaking. Sara sends Michael back into the shelter of the dive shop and turns to face him. Rain stings her cheeks.
She takes a fortifying breath, intending to make every effort to keep her words benign. “Where do you think I got it?”
He reels on the spot as though struck by some unseen blow. “Not this again!”
She holds her ground, gesturing at the origami in his hands. “Then you tell me what you thought when you saw that. You tell me what it means to you!” The wind is a rush in her ears: she has to yell.
Lincoln has no trouble yelling back. “Michael used to make these! Alright? He used to make these, just like this, when we were kids.”
Sara feels something rise in her chest, something that sends her breath from her lungs in a sharp exhale before it becomes lodged like a hard lump in her throat, because he‘s not finished. He holds up the truck in one tight fist. “But all this means is that we’ve got someone playing us! We’ve got someone fucking with us after all this time, and dammit, Sara! That’s something I needed to know!”
She shakes her head, still unable to draw breath, let alone come to her own defense. “Don’t you dare put that on me,” she finally manages, but she’s not even sure he hears her over the wind. She draws the rose from her bag, then the older one that dates all the way back to Fox River, this one decidedly worse for the wear, and challenges him to compare them. “We both know only one person could have made these identically,” she shouts. She knows she sounds frenetic, but she no longer cares. She grapples in her bag for the crane--Lincoln’s crane--with Michael’s words penned on the wing, but he just stares stubbornly at the mess of paper in her hands.
“What am I looking at?” he shouts over the wind. “What are you saying?”
Somewhere behind them, Sara hears LJ calling to them both. Neither of them turn. “I saw Paul Kellerman,” she yells.
He looks doubtful, and she feels the rage that seems to be always smoldering just under the surface of her psyche ignite in a flash. Just like that, she’s transported back five years, having any one of a hundred frustrating, pointless arguments with her father all over again. She‘s squaring off with Michael in the infirmary, betrayal causing her blood to boil. She’s baking in the sun of Butterfield Road, bent double from the pain of loving someone and wanting it to stop. She dripping wet and gasping, telling Kellerman himself to go to hell.
She swipes at the rain falling into her eyes, then turns on her heel and pushes through the blowing sand back to the dive shop to retrieve Michael and go home. She’s never been one to walk away from a fight, but Lincoln is quite nearly all the family she has left.
She’s not sure how many more bridges she has left to burn.