As of 8 am this morning, the governor has granted your brother clemency.
Michael stared after The Pope as he turned and strode down the catwalk away from the cell, the shock of his words still spinning through his head, buzzing with the chaotic frenzy of an insect flitting from spot to spot, never landing. Never stilling. How could this be? What had happened? He was reeling from the surprise, but above the hum of his confusion, a internal shout of joy was sounding from his heart to his toes and back again, rising in volume until he wouldn't be surprised to find he was yelling audibly. It was over. Lincoln was spared.
A minute later, footsteps were again sounding on the metal catwalk, and when the guard paused outside his cell and the panel slid open, it took Michael a moment to remember why he was there. It was a five minute walk to the infirmary, and he spent the entire time reigning the discordant notes of his disbelief back in, assessing and cataloguing. Elation now grated against desperation, because he had to call it off. The escape. The tunnel. Bellick duct-taped in the pipes. All of it. There were loose ends to tie, fragments to be made seamless, and fast.
He scanned her face the second he saw her, watching her walk from her office to his side in Exam Room 2. She moved with careful deliberation, and her last words to him the day before, spoken in the wake of a new lock installed on her door,rose up in his consciousness to mock him. We're done here. Had she had a hand in this?
She didn't want him to ask her. She kept her hands and her eyes busy ripping the paper off a sterile syringe and drawing up the insulin, and now that she was standing over him, reaching for his hand and pressing the tester into the pad of his finger, he could feel a brittle stiffness in her every move, seeping under the pores of his skin and spreading. Now he was nervous, too.
Impossibly, she wasn't angry. When her eyes dared to catch his-just twice in the entire six minutes they were together-they were warm. They shone with an almost glassy sheen, as though she were…exhilarated. Self-accomplished, even?
"I heard about your brother," she said eventually, her hair almost but not quite brushing his cheek as she leaned toward him with a cotton ball. "I'm so glad, Michael."
For an instant, she looked like she wanted to say more. He heard the quiver of something just below the level cadence of her tone, and he wanted to reach for her. Her hand was right there, right next to his, on the side of the exam table, and then her fingers were curving around the edge of the metal prep tray and she was rising, turning away. It was just as well, of course, but all the same, when he stood reluctantly, taking a step toward her, it hurt more than he had anticipated to watch her take her own hasty step backward. He swallowed. "About yesterday-"
She held up one hand, shaking her head, and the gesture was as effective as a gag in his mouth. He stopped, silent. "Not today," she said, her voice a low, urgent whisper. He could discern a single isolated muscle clenching beneath her jaw. He had the sudden impulse to press his finger right there, on that pulse point, and feel her heart pounding underneath his fingertips. Just once. Just today. "Tell Lincoln…I'll need to schedule a regular physical with him sometime next week, or the next." She paused, as though something pleasant had just occurred to her, then she braved locking her eyes with his. "No rush." She smiled.
She smiled, and it was joy and pain manifested as one, and he literally had to ball his hands into fists to keep from touching her. It wasn't until later, when he was back in his cell, sitting on his bunk and taking stock, that he realized this was the first day of the rest of his sentence.
Wait for me.
She had tried to forget the feel of his hand on the back of her neck, the sensation of his mouth on hers-seeking, demanding-the taste of him that had left her feeling both fragile and invincible. The revelation of his betrayal, laid bare before her only yesterday, still seared like acid, churning her stomach with fierce, righteous anger. And yet.
And yet last night she had driven straight from Fox River to sit in her father's outer office all evening as he determinedly worked late, allowing her fury to fan and flare like the woman scored she was, while he shut her out. While he put her off. She had waited and waited, with nothing to but the feel of Michael's lips still burning into her flesh for company, leaving her feeling exposed and raw, and at the time, it had seemed as good a way as any to exercise her frustration. To convert her anger into action, and to divert her from the glass of scotch neat that awaited her at any of the half dozen bars less than a block in any direction from her apartment. And it had worked.
She read the question in Michael's eyes the second he walked into the infirmary, but she couldn't answer it. Not now. Instead, she prepped her tray. She offered her hand, palm up, to receive his, as she did every day, cradling his finger between hers as she pricked it and watched the single bead of blood swell to a dark maroon against his olive skin. She relied on the comforting rhythm of their familiar routine like a crutch, trying to convince herself this was standard care. This was protocol.
She felt his gaze. She could pinpoint every second he looked at her and every second he looked away, over and over, until she finally felt ready to melt. His hand sat millimeters from hers, then moved away, then slid closer. This was madness.
"I heard about your brother," she blurted, because something had to happen to interrupt the rapidly accelerating beat of her heart. "I'm so glad, Michael." And she was. She was.
Late that afternoon, the prison buzzed with the discovery of Brad Bellick, taped and bound, in a pipe below the guard break room, blinking up through the darkness toward a glaring hole smashed through the floor directly above him. He had been brought to her on a gurney, yelling incessantly about Scofield and breakout plans and how he was going to kill that son-of-a-bitch before the day was out, and when she had stuck him in the thigh with 30 ml Thorazine, the silence that followed had constituted the first calm she felt all day.
Later, signing out in the staff room, she learned Charles Westmoreland had taken the blame for the whole thing, from the hole under the break room to the shovel to Bellick's head. When asked about Michael Scofield, Westmoreland had only shook his head in confusion. What did the college kid have to do with his only child dying in a hospital, miles away? What did he have to do with the desperation a father feels in the event of his daughter's suffering?
Back in her office, Sara leaned against her desk, watching the staff parking lot slowly clear out below her. She should go home. She should be staring out at the darkening Chicago skyline from the comfort of her kitchen, not here, where the bars over the safety glass spliced her view into dozens of symmetrical shards. But she stayed anyway, thinking of keys and holes and infirmary doors. Of catalysts and pieces to this puzzle. Of herself, and Michael. She couldn't form his name without feeling her pulse spike, and she wished there was an easy explanation why. She feared there was. She had questions, so many questions, and five years seemed a long time to wait when the answer remained right in front of her every single day.