Title: Here Is What I Know Now
Word Count: 372
Rating: G
Summary: The first time Lincoln sees his brother, Michael is nothing more than a few fuzzy lines on a monitor, moving hazily around and looking more like a blob than a child.
Disclaimer: Paul Scheuring and a whole lot of other people who aren't me own Prison Break.
A/N: First part of a series of pointless, semi-fluffy childhood drabbles/short ficlets.
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The first time Lincoln sees his brother, Michael is nothing more than a few fuzzy lines on a monitor, moving hazily around and looking more like a blob than a child.
He almost doesn't believe his mother when she tells him that that blob is his baby brother or sister, and convinces himself for several weeks that she's just making it up to punish him for being bad, because why would they want another baby anyway? Especially when it makes his parents yell and scream and cry at each other.
He realizes when he finally notices his mother's growing belly that this baby – the baby that really is in there – is the source of his father's anger, his mother exhaustion, his inability to eat Frosted Flakes anymore for breakfast –
it's the same thing, she tells him in the supermarket as she puts a bag of sugary cereal that he can tell is most definitely not made by Kellog's in the shopping cart, and we need to save the money with your brother on the way
– the cause of all of their problems.
When he wakes one morning to find his father gone and his mother standing breathless over a note with his dad's handwriting, Lincoln panics and dials 911 and rids all the way to the hospital clutching his mother's hand while she cries and rubs her stomach.
He refuses to leave when the doctor suggests that he go play in the waiting room, and listens with a vague sense of understanding as the adults speak over him. His father is gone – gone forever? That can't be right… – and his mother is sad and scared and his brother might be hurt, even though he's still inside her stomach, and that's all he can bear to listen to before he stalks out of the room and into the waiting room to kick over a pile of building blocks that someone had made into a castle.
He hates his father for being mean and always yelling and making his mother sad and hurting his brother, and he swears that he'll never even ask for Frosted Flakes ever again as long as his brother is okay.
And just yesterday he still thought he hated his brother.