NA: Hope you'll enjoy this piece. This new season is really getting me back into the Mi/Sa fandom (shame we don't get more of them onscreen). Comments are always welcome.
Sara Tancredi's face is one that Michael knows literally by heart before he even meets her, a face that he studies the way he studies every other detail of his escape plans, and among the blueprints, the code words and the intricate technicalities he needs to work through, Sara's picture stands out provocatively as the human stain in his elaborate scheme. Staring at him, from the wall of his apartment, the innocent features and beaming smile are an accusatory reminder of what Michael is preparing. Sara Tancredi is the first step into Michael's manipulation, the only collateral damage that he's actually premeditated.
He hasn't even met her yet and already he owes her.
It never occurred to Michael Scofield in the first thirty years of his life that guilt could have a color, but the second that he sees her, in real life – and the long locks that travel down her back are brighter than on the pictures, a golden blush under the quiet daylight – he knows, immediately, that his is red.
Red, or so he's always thought, is the color of shame, but that doesn't get in his way of sounding deliberately charming when he introduces himself, of casually popping out that quote which he read was her favorite, and of cracking an elegant smile when he makes her laugh.
This seduction is coordinated every bit as much as the other stages of the escape and somehow, surprisingly, Michael manages to regard it at first with a cold pragmatism.
It is simply part of the things that need to be done in order to break his brother out of prison. He doesn't enjoy making a fool of Sara Tancredi – she seems like a good person – just like he doesn't enjoy getting involved with the likes of John Abruzzi, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and when were there ever such desperate times as these?
Their first interview is brief but efficient – he only needs to gets her infatuated enough in case she becomes useful later on – he's got her smiling by the time that he walks out, and he can tell that she isn't used to enjoying this. Working in a maximum-security prison, he guesses, isn't something that Sara does for personal fulfillment. It's about giving rather than taking, about making amends. Given what he's read about her history with drugs, Michael might even allege that she sees it as punishment.
How ironical, he reflects, that every person here, down to the prison doctor, is serving some kind of sentence.
This is how Michael thinks of Sara Tancredi, after just one meeting, and he hopes that it's how it'll remain. Cold. Unemotional.
In a way – colorless.
…
But there's that flash of red hair, catching him by surprise, moving smoothly with every casual motion that Sara makes, smelling of sweet strawberry shampoo – he can catch the fragrance whenever she gets close enough – and it's oddly coming to represent everything that Michael hasn't planned about this, everything that he wants to hide from.
He's always had a thing for redheads. This detail felt irrelevant until he met her, until he fully realized that despite reading so many things about her past, he doesn't know Sara Tancredi, and it isn't a picture that he's seducing.
Michael had meant for her to be a pawn in his game, not a second player. For her to be flattered by his compliments, to smile, laugh, and accept his affection.
How foolish could he be, to have planned every detail of this escape but not to have expected that she would actually respond to him; that he, in turn, would be seduced.
There are flowers, blooming from a corner in her office, which prompts him to ask, "Do we have an admirer?" He asks it with the right amount of confidence but feels somewhat comforted to hear that they're from her father.
And then she says it – words that he can't manage out of his system. Sounding cold, cynical, somehow unemotional, that those flowers will end up in the trash by the end of the week.
Of course, they will, and yet Michael could not see the wrong in enjoying the refreshing looks of them until she pointed it out.
It takes him a few seconds to realize where his discomfort is coming from, the neglected margins of his guilty conscience – Sara Tancredi has no interest and no patience for things that aren't meant to last. The beauty of flowers is ephemeral and, just like that – somewhat unfairly – their charm is lost on her.
"I'm sorry you feel that way," he says on his way out. "About the flowers."
Then he is taken back to his cell, and the look of faint startle on her face stays with him with an excruciating persistence, as if the temporary aspect of their relationship did not exist, until she brought him to think of it.
It isn't only that he enjoys her company – how could he not? – and knows that his visits to the infirmary are numbered. What haunts him is the part that he plays in this. That he's going to leave behind a woman who is so cynical with the world that she will most likely not even be surprised by it. A woman who is so used to un-lasting promises that his will just get lost in the midst.
Michael wants to be different for her, somehow.
Through the rush of prison life and planning his brother's escape, he wants Sara Tancredi to think that he means something. Something that's different from what she's been given all her life.
Something immortal.
…
He gets the paper from C-Note, who thinks the request is so ridiculous he doesn't even charge him. He leaves him plenty of choice, too, from bright yellow to navy blue, the sheets of paper momentarily fill Michael's brain with something like intoxication – too many colors after weeks living off from prison-gray and that intangible, daily flash of red.
Focusing on the making of a new origami piece feels nice, smoothing the edges with heed and folding them again, it requires the patience of a craftsman, and Michael's got more than enough of it.
By the time that he's done, the flower looks beautiful and everlasting, which is precisely how he wanted it.
He's chosen a red sheet of paper for it. What else could he have picked?
…
Red is the warmest color, and just for that, it makes sense that Michael has come to equate it with his feelings for her. Her nursing touch through plastic gloves, the look of increasing sympathy in her eyes when she tends to his injuries – there're quite a lot more than his plan predicted – those are the warmest things that Michael is entitled, in Fox River, the only comfort he can hope to get.
He wishes he'd realized sooner that red is the color of desire, and for the logic of that alone, it was best he remained cautious.
During the first few weeks that Michael spent in prison, Sara stayed firmly put from his fantasies, perhaps only because that he was using her at all felt immoral enough, so that thinking of her sexually would altogether wreck his moral standards.
It's been coming, gradually, so he's been able to convince himself he had it under control. Every time she gave him his shot of insulin and the smell of strawberry filled his nostrils, it's been getting closer, deeper, until seeing her felt entirely unrelated from saving Lincoln.
When he takes them both by surprise and leans in to kiss her, his mind is overwrought and he can't tell whether he's serving the purpose of the escape or his own.
The wetness of her lips seems to lock him into a separate universe, and this is when he knows that he hasn't been in control at all. For the few minutes that the kiss endures, Michael knows that they've both left the infirmary walls, and wherever they are now is out of space and time, oblivious to the boundaries imposed by his uniform and her nametag.
It's the first time since Michael has crossed Fox River's gates that he truly feels that he's escaped.
And that's when he knows that he wants her, not because she is the only charitable soul he can reach out to, not because she brings him comfort. He wants her, as a free man, in a way that has nothing to do with this place or his brother.
By the time that she pulls away, he's forgotten all about the key hanging from her pocket, his initial motivation. She looks at him patiently. The breath he's stolen from her has flushed the flesh of her cheeks and now they're a shade of crimson.
"What do you want from me, Michael?"
Hearing her speak his name like that, almost makes him believe he is who she thinks he is – Michael Scofield, willing to serve a five-year sentence, and maybe he'd be willing to serve it, if it meant seeing her every day for half a decade.
"Wait for me," he says, because she's asked what he wanted, not what he needed.
All things come with a price, and when the prison guard takes him back to his cell, he thinks that leaving Sara behind will probably be his worst sacrifice.
It would not have been fair, he reckons, for him to cause so much pain to spare his brother's life, without losing anything dear to him in the process.
…
No two emotions are the same yet Michael can categorize his so easily, and those that regard Sara are so specific he hardly needs to. In Fox River, learning to know her, he discovered love, warmth, and you would think that, after he's left, that all that would remain would be a vague memory of her, burning bright and blushing red, that nothing new would be introduced. He almost wishes that were true.
There is an anger, unlike anything he's ever felt, that is specific to her. He gets it in different levels, each time one notch higher, until he wonders how he managed to spend his life thinking he did not understand violence.
That brand-new Sara-anger is a blinding, blood-hued tidal wave that swamps his system, and just like that, Michael is no longer the man with a plan, the man who thoroughly thinks things through before taking any action, the man he's always been.
It turns out that love-driven anger makes him into a most primary being, and that there is nothing to understand about violence – it is a human reaction as logical as any other. There is no logic to be found in most of humanity, anyhow.
The first time it happens is when Brad Bellick tells him about the overdose – and he can't say who's most surprised, when he kicks him in the face, Bellick, Lincoln or himself – but he knows that for what may be the first time in his life, he's acted on impulse, with no thought in mind, only this blinding blast of rage.
He thinks he's seen the worst of it then, of that anger, but he's barely scratched the surface.
The second time takes him utterly by surprise, and it's so deep, so visceral that he's sure the blood in his veins is burning red.
The reason why the rage comes as a surprise, is that he was in such a happy place, just seconds before. Meeting Sara, at the train station, holding her in his arms and breathing in the smell of her hair, which she's dyed black, but which still smells like strawberry.
They pull away, and she looks so beautiful and breathing that he wants to hold her again. After everything he's been through, it feels like he's earned the right to indulge, which he knows would make him sound selfish as shit.
Instead, he picks up a brown lock of hair between his fingers and smiles at how short it is.
Sara smiles back at him, and he feels that everything is suddenly right with the world, before she spots the third man, standing behind Lincoln –
And soon everything in his brain goes red again.
It seems that Michael-in-love is a very dangerous man to cross. How surprising, that violence comes to him so simply, at the thought of Sara being tied to a chair and tortured, because of him. It's the thought of her being left to drown that really gets him – makes him wild, incapable of restraint. She could be dead, right now, would be dead, if she hadn't narrowly escaped.
This makes grabbing Paul Kellerman by the throat and pinning him to a wall the only reasonable reaction, and as he chokes him accordingly, he feels as though he's never been more rational in his life.
This anger that drove him half insane becomes, in the end, nothing more than a vivid memory. He still trembles at the thought of it, when Sara brings it up, a few years later, in the course of a casual conversation.
They're watching the news together, sitting on the living room couch, in each other's arms. It's a few hours past dinner time and their son is asleep upstairs, when Kellerman's face pops up on the screen. Michael can feel Sara tensing beside him, and he motions towards the remote.
"Don't," she says. Whether it's because she wants to watch or just to prove herself that this man no longer holds power over her, Michael can't tell. However, he doesn't want to hear about what a hot shot politician Kellerman's become.
He doesn't care about how America loves tales of redemptions and second chances.
People who used to drown innocent women in motel bathtubs should never ever be allowed to become senators.
"You know the most striking memory I have of that man?" She says.
"Well," Michael hazards carefully, "I can guess."
The genuineness of her smile surprises him, when she pivots to fully face him. He can never smile like this, with Paul Kellerman making a speech in the background, from his television screen.
"The one I have in mind is a good one."
This gets him to arch a brow. "Really?"
Sara folds her legs on the couch. The motion looks graceful and inadvertently attractive. "You remember that day we met up at the train station? When I told you what he'd done to me, and you just started strangling him right there and then?"
"Well… I'm not exactly proud of that."
She pays no mind to his comment, "Anybody could have seen you. I never thought you would react like this. For a second, I really thought that you might kill him."
It had been a close call. Instead of saying so, he wonders, "This is a good memory how?"
"I don't know, really. Right at that moment, I was just so certain that you loved me, that we were fighting the same fight, you and I, and we'd protect each other down to the bitter end."
Michael grins. Strangely, he and Sara don't discuss the past that often. Lincoln, whom they see on a regular basis, never brings it up either. They've all moved on, and they don't feel the need to rehash what's happened.
"So," he says, teasingly, "you're saying that you found my choking Paul Kellerman rather romantic?"
"Well, Michael, I wouldn't say romantic. But you know, back then we didn't exactly buy each other flowers or go on dates or anything. I had to do with what you gave me."
This tears a full-blown chuckle out of him. The television has moved on to a commercial that neither of them pays attention to. As Michael looks at his wife, for a few moments, her eyes are a gateway to the past and he can see the whole of their story unfolding before him, once again.
"You know," he admits, "there's always something I wanted to ask you."
"What is it?"
He gives it a few more seconds before going through with it – it really is a silly question. "The day we got married."
She gets a slightly amused air on her face. "I remember quite well."
He does too, and he waits for the reminiscence to be complete, for them to both be back on that beach, holding each other's hands as they took their vows.
"Why did you wear red?" He inquires.
It isn't a traditional color for weddings, and he was actually expecting white. When he saw her standing there, under the sun, and she was wearing this gorgeously fitting scarlet dress, he was actually blown away. The color red, and how it seemed to be entwined with their relationship, had always felt like a kind of private joke to Michael, known only to himself.
Sara doesn't look taken aback by his question. "I don't know," she answers. "For some reason," and she couldn't tell him what reason exactly, "it felt like I should."