Title: The Weight
Fandom: Prison Break
Characters: Michael, Lincoln
Prompt: 011: Red
Word Count: 2,232
Rating: I'm going to go with an R. This one's on the dark side, and a little bloody.
Summary: He's told himself before that he'd never do this, never take this last step, but his life, his mind, are spinning so wildly out of his grasp and this is all he has left now.

Disclaimer: Paul Scheuring and a whole lot of other people who aren't me own Prison Break.

The first drop crawls slowly around his wrist and then falls to the pool of water in the sink below, hitting the surface and exploding into a tiny bullet of red streaking downward. Michael watches the one drop expand and spread, tinting the clear water a faint pink as his blood mixes with it. Another red drop soon follows the first, then several more as the blood begins to flow more heavily, and Michael sighs in contentment as he feels a familiar, comforting pain slice through him.

He watches each drop hit the water, plip plip plip, and thinks how easy this really is, how lovely it feels to be in control of himself, completely in control for the first time in what seems like forever. He's told himself before that he'd never do this, never take this last step, but his life, his mind, are spinning so wildly out of his grasp and this is all he has left now.

The faucet in the bathtub behind him has been leaking for weeks, and he's been listening to it for weeks, trying to figure out which pipe has eroded and how to fix it. The gentle drip drip drip is starting to sound monstrous now and he's desperate to stop listening to it, so he tries to dull the noise with the pain in his wrist and hopes everything will stop soon, because this is just too much.

There's still a bit of shaving cream left around his jaw that he hasn't gotten to – he can feel it pressing against his face, weighing him down, and he wants it gone, but everything will be gone in a few minutes anyway, so he doesn't bother to wipe it away. He just concentrates on the pain that shoots up his arm originating from the sharp feeling in his wrist.

He fingers the small blade that he took apart his razor to get and tries to stop looking at how deeply red the water is becoming. There are swirls of crimson scattered throughout the sink and he doesn't want to think about how they connect to make a pattern that looks like a red dinosaur amidst the pink water, or how the white porcelain is going to be permanently stained.

He brings the blade to his wrist again as the sights and the drip drip drip of the bathtub's faucet start to cloud his head, wants only to make them go away, and sighs again as the blade presses into his skin.

"What're you doing?" asks a shocked voice next to him.

"What's it look like?" he mumbles back without looking up from his wrist.

"Excuse me?"

Michael looks up at his mother standing next to him, a stunned look on her face, mouth open.

"Don't you talk to me that way!" she lectures him and he looks away, ashamed.

"'m sorry," he replies softly and lowers his head, letting his too-long hair fall into his eyes. He's always preferred his hair short but lately has been unmotivated to do much of anything with it and allowed it to grow out long enough to flop over his brow and get caught in his eyelashes. He's found lately that he appreciates the protective curtain it gives him sometimes.

"Why would you do this to yourself?" his mother asks softly and he shakes his head, eyes still downcast.

"I don't know," he tells her half-heartedly.

"Yes you do," she chides him and he raises his head to look off to her left at a patch of peeling paint on the wall, not meeting her eyes.

"I'm going crazy," he says in a cracking whisper. "You keep showing up, but you shouldn't be here, and I'm loosing it."

"You're trying to kill yourself," she says and Michael bites his lip, feeling terribly guilty even though she's not real. "And you've never even told anyone about this, about how you're feeling, have you?"

"I can't. I should be able to… deal with this. But there's something wrong with me. And it's not going away, it's just getting worse. You're not real, I know that, but I keep seeing you."

He feels disgustingly weak, but he can't stop his voice from shaking. Tears find their way to his eyes, along with a heavy feeling in his chest that he's felt before and is so tired of having. He's tired of everything now and wants so much for it to be gone.

"But – but you don't have to hurt yourself like this, you – "

"Stop, please," Michael hisses, turning away from her and examining the gash on his wrist, eyes tracing over the angry red edges of his skin splitting apart and watches the steady flow of blood that seeps out, splitting off into a trail down his arm to the elbow and onto the floor, and a trickle off of his wrist into the sink.

"Listen to the kid," a new voice pipes up from Michael's other side. Michael doesn't have to look to know that his father is sitting on the closed toilet seat next to him, arms probably folded across his chest and leaning back against the wall casually. "He wants to off himself, let 'im do it."

Michael sighs again and leans forward, bracing his uninjured hand against the rim of the sink as his chest tightens painfully. He's never even seen a photograph of his father so he has no idea why his brain conjures up the images of him that it does – a burly man with dark hair, tanned skin, and sharp eyes, an amalgam of himself and his brother.

But there he is, showing up more and more frequently lately with his mother, providing an antagonistic tone to war with his mother's soothing one. Michael is scared every time either one of them show up circling around and speaking to him as if there's nothing unusual about hearing from the mother who died almost five years ago and the father he's never even met.

"Don't tell him that!" Michael's mother says sharply. Then to her son she says, "You're just not thinking this through, you need to stop."

Michael can't think of how to reply for a few minutes, then finally says, "doesn't matter," and brings the blade to scrape again across his wrist, grunting with the lovely pain that comes with the cut and soothes the panic in his chest.

"Michael," she says in a warning tone, but she doesn't touch him – she never touches him, and for some reason that makes his heart hurt a little bit more.

"What'd I just say?" his father speaks up again with a bark. "Stop trying to talk him out of it, better for everyone if he's gone. Definitely a step up for him."

"Yeah," Michael whispers, dropping his hands, blood streaking down his newly washed pants, and turns to look at his father, wondering how a hallucination can be so perceptive.

"That's not true," his mother pleads, shifting to try and catch Michael's eye. "What about your brother? He needs you."

"No he doesn't," his father snorts, and Michael shifts uncomfortably between them, starting to feel a little dizzy from the argument and the slow escaping of his blood.

"What's he need Mike for? He's got a family, his own kid – no time for this one, and Linc's always been the better of the two of them anyway. Why d'you think I left? Think I wanted him for a son?" He gestures to Michael with a sideways jerk of his thumb and Michael tightens the hand of his injured arm into a fist.

"You don't know what you're talking about, you don't know either of them," Michael's mother shoots back.

Michael takes a breath and then slams his fist into the mirror, breaking it into a dozen pieces of varying sizes that end up scattered throughout the bathroom. His fist looks similar now to his wrist, blood seeping from several gashes around his hand, and he rips his eyes away from his hand to look at what he's done to the mirror. There are several chunks of glass still left intact within the mirror's frame, and two pieces just barely holding on, swaying back and forth slightly as they dangle.

Michael breathes and his parents continue on as if nothing happened.

"Yeah, and you do?" his father replies to his mother. "You've been gone for years, they're forgetting all about you. Mike here's loosing his marbles, what's he got left to look forward to anyway? A straightjacket in the loony-bin? Better off getting the job done now, act like a man for once."

"He could talk to someone, see a therapist, get someone to help him."

Michael's father laughs at this. "Maybe, if he were a girl. And what'd that do, anyway? The boy's cracking up, nothing anyone can do now to put his head back together."

Michael's chest is tightening again, it's starting to feel hard to breathe, and the drip drip drip of the faucet is getting even louder, thundering in his ears and through his head and he can't figure out how to stop it. He moves to slash at his wrist again when his mother turns back to him.

"Michael, you don't need to do this. It'll be okay, I promise."

"Please don't promise me that," he asks her quietly, and then his father juts in again.

"Christ, will you leave the damn kid alone? What a goddamn nag, always have been."

"Please," Michael whispers, closing his eyes and leaning his head against a piece of the mirror hanging that's still vaguely intact. The cool glass feels briefly wonderful before he starts thinking about the tiles carpeting the floor and tries to remember exactly how many there are, how many are black, how many are white, whether the two numbers are equal, and then he forces himself back to his bickering parents.

"Please stop, please. Why can't you leave me alone?"

"Hey, you need us, Mike," his father replies flippantly. "You'd probably punk out otherwise."

Michael shakes his head slowly against the glass as tears begin to slip out from under his closed eyelids. "I don't understand why this is happening, I don't understand."

"You're perfectly fine just the way you are, Michael," his mother tells him evenly, using the same tone she did when she used to tell him just ignore the bullies and they'll leave you alone.

"No, I'm not," he replies sadly and lifts his head. It feels heavy for some reason, like the rest of his body, really, and hard to hold up. He settles for letting it loll slightly to one side, eyes moving slowly around the room as he speaks. "I'm going crazy. It's getting worse, nothing stops it anymore, everything's – everything's always there, always in my head, always, I can't stop, can't relax, can't stop being scared and… and frantic, all the time I'm just… I don't want to do this anymore."

"Do what, honey?"

"Live."

No one speaks for a few minutes, during which the drip drip drip is horrifyingly deafening until finally his mother begins, "No, baby – "

"Christ, would you shut it?" Michael's father interrupts again with a bark to his mother and she looks momentarily taken aback. "Just do it, Mike, stop dicking around and get it done."

"Why, why would you say something like that to your own son?" Michael's mother asks, sounding fierce.

"Because he's worthless, weak. This is the only thing he can do for himself."

"No," she says again, and turns from Michael to his father and back again. "Michael, no, please, you're not. Just stop and talk to someone, you can – "

Michael stops her with a shake of his head and closes his eyes. "There's no one." He's starting to feel dizzy, and thinks that it seems too early for this, he hasn't even hit the vein yet in his wrist, but it's getting harder to stay upright, so he sinks down to sit on the cold floor and leans back against the bathtub.

His father leans forward, elbows resting on his knees, and speaks in a low voice. "He's a blemish."

At that Michael finishes off the skin at his wrist, slashing the tiny blade horizontally around so that the flesh is quickly ripped apart fully and the blood and can sluice freely down his arm to drench the clean tiles. Sixty-five white and eighty-two black, they don't connect in any discernable pattern and it's always so damn distracting. Why would someone lay tiles in such disarray, Michael always wonders, and his mind pours over this once again as he has to lay himself down on the floor, nearly all of his strength gone now.

But it'll stop soon. He won't have to think about where the broken pieces of the mirror are in a few more minutes, how close they are to his cheek, his arm, his foot, and what other damage they could do to him if he happened to roll over or shift one of his legs just a bit to the right.

His parents are blissfully silent now, and Michael's chest feels just a little bit lighter with them gone. But he thinks he can hear Lincoln's voice, he's not sure whether or not it's real, and he's just a little bit frightened as he slips out of awareness.