A/N: I'm attempting to answer several prompt requests here: 1. Henry escaping his crib, 2. Jealous Sara, and 3. more of Michael's past. Takes place in the Afterward universe (of course) when Henry is sixteen months.
Mike's wail of anger cut across the silence of the house on a Saturday morning at dawn. Sara sat bolt upright in bed, still frowning to place the sound as Michael slid past her, departing their room to take the stairs two at a time.
"Mommmm!" Mike yelled. "Daaaaaaad! Come here!"
She ran after Michael, stepping through Mike's doorway just behind him, only to squint in surprise. Sixteen-month-old Henry sat in the center of Mike's floor, surrounded by the carnage of multiple LEGO creations. He currently held a space shuttle in one hand, which he proceeded to smash into a Wild West fort as plastic bricks flew. Mike stood over him, hands fisted at his sides, his body quaking with anger.
"Henry! Noooo!" he wailed again.
Henry peered up at him, his face first awash in delight at the sight of his brother, then perplexed at the look on his face. Mike was so rarely anything but gentle, patient, and loving. "Mine?"
Henry wasn't expressing possession of the LEGOs. 'Mine' was 'Mike', or as close as Henry could come to pronouncing the name of his favorite person in the world. He'd said 'Mine' before 'Mama' or 'Dada' or even 'no'. Sara and Michael used the evolution of this nickname as an opportunity to teach Mike the definition of irony: Henry did indeed consider Mike to be 'his' entirely.
"Not yours!" Mike shouted now in his brother's upturned face, though he knew as well as anyone what Henry had meant.
"Do not yell at your brother," Sara chastised automatically, though she understood Mike's frustration. She reached down automatically to snag the now-individual LEGO bricks out of Henry's grasp. They were perfect choking hazard size.
Henry started to cry, very unaccustomed to being yelled at, and Mike bit his lip, clearly trying not to join him. His genteel nature struggled to win out over his frustration over the LEGOs; Sara watched the clash of battle play out all over his face. She glanced back at the floor, surveying the wreckage more closely, then laid a hand on Mike's head. "I'm sorry, Mike," she told him solemnly. "We'll help you fix it." She looked to Michael, but he'd returned to the hallway, where he looked between Mike's room and Henry's.
"How did he get in here?" he asked. Henry still slept confined in his crib.
"Maybe we left the crib rail down?" Sara wondered doubtfully. Michael had put Henry to bed, and the chances of him overlooking such an important safety measure were slim to none. None, actually.
"I don't know, but he does this all the time," Mike supplied. "I can't leave anything set up anymore."
"He's done this before?" Michael asked swiftly. "Come in your room like this, before morning?"
"Yeah," Mike said, bending to salvage his LEGO space station, which had somehow survived ground zero. He lifted it carefully onto his desk. "Usually he just gets in bed with me." He looked around for anything else worth saving. "But I guess this was more tempting," he added darkly.
The thought of Henry enjoying free rein of the house at night put Sara on edge. "Mike, we needed to know that. We didn't know Henry was getting out of his crib."
"Well, I always put him back," Mike defended.
They watched Michael disappear down the hall to Henry's room. Sara picked up Henry and followed. In his room, the crib rail was up and secured, no furniture adjacent. "How is he getting out?" she asked Michael.
He studied the crib from all sides, frowning.
"Is he tall enough now to climb over?" Sara asked. She placed Henry in the crib, earning her a cry of protest. He immediately stood, hands on the rail, which still came to his shoulders. Unless he was the only toddler in the world with the upper arm strength to do a full pull-up, he wasn't hefting himself over. "What, then?" Sara wondered.
Michael stared from the crib rail to Henry, eyes narrowing. "Maybe he'll show us," he ventured. At this, Henry sat down in the center of his mattress, staring back at his father as if to say he hadn't been born yesterday. Sara smiled as Michael added wryly, "Or maybe not."
Henry rose again and reached out his arms pitifully, looking for all the world as though he relied completely on the mercy of his parents to free him from the crib. With a sigh, Sara lifted him out. "Go back to bed," she told Michael. "We'll go downstairs and start the coffee."
Michael pointed to Mike's room. "I'm going to lend him a hand with the LEGOs." He placed a kiss to her cheek. "Tell me when coffee's ready?"
Most of Mike's LEGO creations were past saving, but Michael fixed what he could. Then the two of them sat together on the floor and sorted parts, placing pieces into piles for later construction. "Little brothers can be such a pain," Michael noted.
"It's okay, Dad," Mike answered generously, on a sad sigh, which only made Michael feel worse about the destruction. "I'm sorry I got super mad."
"You're allowed to get angry sometimes, Mike," he reminded him. So often, Mike took on the role of peacemaker, and Michael wondered how much of this agreeable demeanor was simply his nature, and how much had been brought on by years of being aware - too aware as a young child - of the needs of others…his mother's in particular.
"I wish I could explain to him that he can't do LEGOs," Mike said. "Will he understand that soon?"
Michael shook his head slowly. "I remember wanting to do everything Uncle Lincoln did," he told him. "I hated it when he took off on his bike to school, when I was still too little to go. I'd watch him from the window until he turned the corner. One time," he remembered, "there was a big snowstorm, and school was cancelled. Lincoln had all kinds of plans to hang out with his friends all day, sledding and building forts. But then the power went out, and it was so stormy, we couldn't even go outside to play. Linc was so mad to be stuck inside, but I loved every minute of it, because it was just the two of us, all day long."
"Where were your mom and dad?" Mike asked. "They were home too, right?"
Michael tried to keep his answer neutral, devoid of emotion. "No, it was just me and Uncle Lincoln that day," he said simply. "I was lucky to have him as a big brother."
Mike nodded solemnly.
Downstairs, Henry looked up happily from his high chair seat when Mike entered the kitchen. "Mine, Mine!" He kicked his legs excitedly, waving a fistful of Cheerios at him, the confrontation upstairs evidently forgotten.
Mike offered him an exasperated smile. Sometimes, Sara thought, he looked seven going on seventeen. Or maybe forty-seven. She couldn't decide whether this made her feel proud or concerned. "Hi, Henry," he returned.
Henry offered him a soggy Cheerio that he fished from his mouth, which made Mike laugh and gag at the same time. "I think I'll pass," he said, which Henry accepted with another happy grin.
"I'm sorry about this morning, baby," Sara told Mike, brushing his hair back from his forehead to press a kiss to his head. "That really sucked." She set a bowl out so he could get his own cereal.
"Yeah," he agreed, "but Dad and I are going to set up a spy cam, and try to catch Henry in the act." The possibilities inherent in this activity seemed to make up for the destruction of his LEGOs. "We can use my Go Pro," he added.
The Go Pro had been a birthday gift from LJ, and until now, had been mounted on the top of the go kart Mike and Michael had constructed with their scrapyard heap. The footage so far hadn't exactly been riveting, probably because Michael had restricted the go-kart's velocity to manual pedal power. Pressing the camera into new use sounded promising. "Good idea," Sara said.
"We'll need to create a timer for it, and figure out a way to add night vision view mode," Michael added, entering behind Mike to head straight for a pad of paper and pencil. "I was just thinking…I bet we can use that old cell phone in my office as a remote control device. We don't want to tip Henry off by coming into the room to check on him."
Sara laughed. "You do know you're talking about a one-year-old, right?"
"Hey, now. Don't underestimate my kid," he told her, smiling into the coffee cup Sara set before him.
"Yeah Mom," Mike added. "Henry's already fooled you guys for weeks. We don't want him onto us."
The construction of the camera became an all-day affair, beginning with a trip to the electronics superstore to purchase an infrared lens and some sort of remote timer. Mike and Michael spread all their new gear on the kitchen table in a tangle of plastic, metal, and wires, where Michael began taking apart his old phone. Watching him unscrew the back panel to review the mother board, Mike said, "It looks like we could make a bomb with all this stuff."
"No, you need something to serve as a detonator to build a bomb," Michael said casually. "A watch can work. And something flammable, like pure alcohol, or C4 or fertil…" He trailed off when he finally noticed the hard look Sara leveled at him. Mike looked at him extra long, too, contemplating this.
Michael cleared his throat, rising to grab a butter knife to pry the plastic panel off his phone. "Anyway, making a camera will be more fun," he finished lamely. To Sara, he added, "sorry," under his breath. She nodded, but that was all she could muster as she emptied the dishwasher with a bit more enthusiasm than necessary.
"It's not as if this entire project isn't already reminding me of past…adventures," she muttered.
From the kitchen table, Mike asked, "Have you? Built a bomb?"
Sara's stomach knotted. Questions like this were exactly what she'd hoped to avoid, when she'd tried to shush Michael. She hated these moments, when a cloud crossed in front of her sun. Michael patted her hand, forced a smile, and turned to Mike. "Not this week," he joked. "I'm probably out of practice." While Mike debated how to interpret this, he swiftly thrust him into the first step of infrared light adapting.
When they had the remote timer and night vision all set up, they spent nearly as long deciding where to mount the Go Pro in Henry's room, out of the toddler's reach yet close enough to record the crib from all angles. While Sara usually relished these moments when father and son became completely engaged in something together, this time, something nagged at her. She just couldn't shake the bomb-making discussion: when she'd she'd told Michael all that talk reminded her of the past, she'd been thinking about L.A., when they'd been forced to improvise all manner of explosives on the fly. But had Michael been thinking of that time? She didn't think so, given the way he'd listed bomb-making ingredients as casually as reciting a cookie recipe. He hadn't even seemed to realize immediately it was an inappropriate topic for Mike.
For over two years, Sara had told herself she was in no rush to fill in the blanks of Michael's seven years away from her. They'd talk about it when they were ready, just as they'd talked through the gaps Michael navigated in Sara's past. She'd convinced herself she wanted to protect Michael, not push him to relive memories that might be painful or damaging to him. Tonight, however, she wasn't fooling herself. The real reason she never probed: she was afraid of what she'd find out.
Bits and pieces surfaced naturally, of course, some insignificant, some too big to wrap her mind around, like debris lapping the shore after a shipwreck. When, on a flight to Chicago, an elderly couple on holiday from Munich had become confused by the flight attendant's instructions, Michael had stepped in seemingly without forethought to explain the situation to them in fluent German. Just something I picked up, he'd told her simply in explanation, retaking his seat next to her. If she'd asked follow up questions, if she'd pressed, he would have been transparent, she was sure. But she hadn't been able to muster the courage.
On the same trip, when they'd gotten stuck overnight returning to Ithaca thanks to a mechanical issue with their aircraft, he'd held a cranky Henry in his arms in the stuffy terminal of Cabo San Lucas International and muttered, "I wouldn't mind having Outis' pilot's license back in my wallet right about now." When she'd looked at him in surprise, he'd just shrugged and said, "It's really not as hard to fly a plane as everyone likes to make out."
And when Heather and Larry asked them to feed their cat and Sara misplaced their alarm code, Michael had not only bypassed the home alarm, but the home security company's firewall as well, to retrieve Larry's password to avoid disturbing him on vacation. Had he always been capable of figuring out such things? Of course. But this hadn't been improvisation. What Sara had witnessed was the automatic execution of a skill set.
At bedtime, Mike had trouble settling down, he was so excited about the spy cam. "I'll come get you the minute Henry comes in my room," he promised Michael. "And if you see anything on the remote, you'll come wake me up?"
"You got it," Michael told him, as Sara, simultaneously said,
"Viewing the video footage can wait until morning."
This seemed reasonable enough to Sara, but Michael and Mike both looked crestfallen. When Mike had dragged his feet to bed, Michael came down to the kitchen to say carefully, "I thought you'd be glad he's forgotten all about the LEGOs."
"I am," she conceded. "It's just…" What was it that bothered her, exactly? Yes, she usually loved seeing the two of them as partners in crime, but Michael's bomb-making talk made the 'crime' in question feel more real than figurative. "I don't like Mike complicit in this," she decided. It sent a warning trill along her spine, as if her son might become dragged into something big and dangerous, just as she had been. As her father had been. As Fernando and Franklin and even Kellerman had been. She knew this was unfair. It was a gross overreaction to the situation. Knowing this did nothing to make her feel better.
"Complicit?" Michael turned the word over in his mouth like he didn't understand its meaning. "In figuring out what Henry's up to?"
See? She couldn't express herself correctly. Maybe she was crazy. She'd become paranoid somewhere along the line. "All that bomb-making talk," she managed, because this was as close as she could come to explaining why her skin felt suddenly clammy. Why she wanted to ban Mike from having anything to do with the video device that reminded her son of an explosive.
Michael looked immediately tense, which wasn't a good sign. "Sara. Mike brought up bombs, not me." He added, "I'm sorry for answering his questions the way I did. I forget sometimes, how young he is." He looked down, studying the counter top his hand rested on as though contemplating some grout work.
"But you…" She wasn't crazy. Her instincts were on target. She could talk herself out of hearing the truth, but not out of that. "What you told Mike…it was based on experience." For a moment, she floundered, casting about in her mind for the words to ask, then just said simply, "Tell me."
He looked up at her slowly, as reluctant to face her as Mike had been to go to bed. "Tell you what, exactly?" he said wearily. "That I was tasked with creating and detonating explosives while I was gone? I was. I did."
She looked at him helplessly, wishing she didn't have to know, but needing to know. She wondered if this had been how Michael had felt, when he'd asked about Jacob. She let her silence speak for itself, until he added quietly, "What do you want me to say? That I have blood on my hands? That I did it to keep so-called Poseidon happy, because I thought doing the job would keep you and Mike safe? Do you really want that on you? Because I don't." He stepped toward her, and guided her toward him, his hands on her shoulders. "I don't."
She allowed herself to lean against him, her cheek finding its favorite resting place nestled just below his collarbone. She sighed. "I suppose it's on both of us," she decided, to feel Michael vehemently shake his head.
"No," he said. "My decisions are my own." He took a long breath. "While I was gone, I alternated between playing the perfect, obedient yes-man and actively plotting against my imprisonment. From making every mission and moment count, to wallowing in grief and not caring about anything." He pulled slightly back to look at her. "You know me. You can imagine, I'm sure, that I wasn't always as in control of myself as I'd liked to have been."
She thought about those first, tense days after Lincoln had found him. Their uncertainly about Michael's mental state…if he even knew his brother. Whether he remembered Sara and Mike at all. "Did you…forget us? Sometimes?"
He touched her cheek; the gesture had Sara clenching her jaw to will back the emotion that would undoubtedly derail Michael. She needed to hear this. "Not even when I wanted to."
"Did you…try to? Forget me? Get…past me?"
He looked at her in confusion. "What do you mean?"
Would he make her spell it out? "Other women, Michael." She braced for impact. The opportunity surely arose. Many times.
At first, she couldn't read the expression on his face. Then it dawned on her; it was bafflement, quickly overlaid with a swift kick of indignation. "I knew you were alive," he said, as if this fact was explanation enough. "I would never. Never."
They looked at each other, close but no longer touching. Michael had pulled away. He was angry, at what she'd assumed. This, in turn, made her angry, at the implication that he, alone, had been faithful.
"It would have been understandable, after I re-married," she tried, as diplomatically as she could muster, while simultaneously, he said,
"How little do you think of me?"
"Michael, that's not fair."
"You think I sacrificed all contact with my family, gave up everything, so I could sleep around? That I'd make our boy complicit in criminal activities?" He tacked this on as a resentful afterthought, his voice rising. "You trust me so little?"
Sara used this opportunity to shout back at him, "So little? You disappeared for seven years. I didn't know where you'd been, or why, or what you'd done. And when I found you, I didn't hesitate, did I?" He looked away, and she relished the righteousness that filled her. She let it spill over. "Did I?"
He glanced up the stairs. "You want Mike to hear you right now?" he seethed.
"You want to take it back?" she spat back. "I didn't ask for explanations. I didn't need them to let you in my house, in my bed, in Mike's life, completely. Not conditionally. You were a husband and a father right then and there, no questions asked."
They so rarely raised their voices at each other, Sara felt tears well in her eyes. Each word, given, received, held the sting of a slap. Michael saw the tears, and he dropped his voice. "I gave up everything," he said again. "I was alone, alright? Completely, if that answers your question."
She allowed just a moment for the relief of this to wash over her. She'd thought so, but she hadn't known so. "When you left, you left me alone, too," she tried, her voice also lowered. As glad as she was to hear there had been no one else, she needed to deflect some guilt.
He shook his head, refusing to allow her this. "You had Mike," he answered bluntly, though his voice remained softer. "Tell me that meant something, because I gave him up for it."
She pinched her eyes shut at this. Not fair, her mind screamed."You can't put that on me when I didn't know. When I didn't get to weigh in, didn't get a choice." He was always so sure he was right. He was always so quick to make decisions for everyone.
"I've told you why I couldn't involve you," he shot back. "And I was right." See? Sara's brain shouted. "It was the right move."
"Then you can't throw it back in my face now," she argued, arms crossed on her chest, legs braced on the kitchen floor. If Michael thought she wasn't going to hold her ground, he didn't know her as well as he thought.
"Sara," he said in exasperation. "All I'm throwing in your face is that I was faithful to you. And that I walked away so Mike wouldn't lose you."
"And all I'm saying is that I did trust you - do trust you - completely, with Mike. With Henry. With everything."
He chanced a step toward her. His lips lifted in an experimental curve. "Then why are we yelling at each other?"
Half of her wanted to smile back, to reclaim her place in the embrace they shared just minutes ago, but the other half won out. "Because you think less of me. Because I can never live up to your standards." She couldn't look at him. Couldn't bear to see if she was right.
"Not true." He tipped her chin up and forced her to look. "Not even close."
He'd remained celibate for her for seven years. During most of that time, he'd had no reason to hope to ever see her again. How was she supposed to deal with that?
"You," he told her, "set my standards. For everything, always. The minute I met you."
She tried to free herself from his gaze, because this was too much. He held her chin firmly, eyes penetrating her. She felt her own finally spill with tears. When he bent and kissed her, his mouth hesitant on her cheek first, then on her lips, she tasted the saltiness. It sent a throb through her, a quick spasm of anguish and longing and need.
She pulled away from him long enough to say, "I love you so much it hurts." Still. All these years later. With so many years in-between. After Mike. After Henry. After chaos and fear and domestic bliss and domestic boredom. Still.
"I know," he said. He kissed her again, soft and slow, his hands cupping her jaw, until all she could think about was sinking into bed with him.
He carried on being almost achingly gentle and generous there too, making love to her with deliberate care. She, in turn, treated him like silk over glass, each brush of her lips and trail of her fingers over his skin an apology returned for their raised voices, their pain, their insecurities. These things would never really go away, she realized, just like the ache of their love for one another.
If one had to coexist with the other, Sara decided she could live with that.
Operation HenryCam was a success, if Michael and Mike's rapt attention to the computer monitor the next morning could be any indication. Their heads pressed together, faces bent to the screen, they may as well have been watching the final seconds of a Final Four basketball game or the culminating moments of an Olympic victory.
"So, how does he do it?" Sara asked impatiently, after waiting for either of them to acknowledge her presence, or Henry's, in the kitchen.
"We're not sure yet," Michael answered, eyes glued to the video.
"He's working on it," Mike added.
"Working on it?" Sara looked over Mike's shoulder to see a greenish-hued image of Henry's pajama-clad behind. She watched as he stood at the back rail of the crib, one chubby bare foot wedged through the slats. Very methodically, he pressed his toes against the wall, rocking the crib forward inch by inch. "How long has he been doing that?"
Mike glanced at the time stamp on the video. "Six minutes and thirty-eight seconds so far," he reported.
Sara sank down in the chair next to them, Henry-in-the-flesh content to toddle toward the lowest kitchen cabinets to empty them of plastic storage containers and pot lids. The Henry on the screen continued to patiently rock the crib with his foot until finally, at minute 11:26, he'd managed to scoot himself close enough to the window ledge to brace his foot on it. With that accomplished, he grasped the crib rails in two fists and walked his other foot up to join the first. With both feet on the ledge, it was an easy exit over the crib rail to slide, tummy against the wall, to the floor.
"Oh my God," Sara said. What sixteen-month-old had the attention span to work such a puzzle for nearly twelve minutes?
"That's crazy awesome," Mike agreed.
'Awesome' wasn't exactly the word Sara had in mind. Henry could have caught himself on the window blind, or hit his head sliding over his crib rail, or…any number of things, really. She looked at Michael. "What are we going to do about this?"
He still studied the screen, looking a bit stunned. "How did he know to do that?" he asked softly.
"He knew if he rocked it far enough, he'd be at the window," Mike supplied, as though answering a very basic question.
"No, I mean, how did he know the first time he did it? It wasn't accidental…it took almost twelve minutes. And how did he remember to do it again?"
No one seemed able to answer this question, though it seemed to Sara that Henry rarely forgot anything once he'd been introduced to it once. He'd long memorized the contents of every drawer, cabinet, and shelf within his reach, had mastered the complicated five-point harness of his car seat (finally liberating himself from his least favorite place), and could point out turn-by-turn directions on all their regularly traveled commutes. But could Henry possibly possess the logical and analytical skills necessary to link both cause and effect and the physics required to free himself from his crib? She looked over her shoulder to stare at him, connecting Tupperware lids to bowls. He crawled entirely into the cupboard in his pursuit of more pieces, making a huge mess. Mike had been a curious, inquisitive toddler, certainly, but he'd more methodical. Careful, like Sara, content to stand back and study what Henry barreled himself toward with little to no regard to self preservation.
"It's certainly impressive," Michael concluded.
"So is the irony," Sara smiled, bending to haul Henry out of the cupboard. Who knew what he'd find back there to put in his mouth.
Michael looked at her blankly.
"Oh c'mon. You don't see anything ironic about your son studying his surroundings and planning and executing an escape?"
Michael took this like a good sport, shaking his head with a wry smile. Mike grinned, remembering his lesson on irony and happy to be in on the grown-up joke. Sara ruffled his hair as he poked his head into the fridge for orange juice. "Mostly I'm just reminding your father that Henry's resemblance to him goes deeper than eye color."
Michael humphed. Mike noted, "I look more like Mom."
"Lucky kid," Michael said, handing him the juice carton.
"I've always seen your dad in you," Sara contradicted, because it was true, and because she knew Mike longed to hear it.
Henry scooted across the kitchen floor toward them, riding a plastic Tupperware lid like a sled. He looked up at Michael when he arrived at his feet, and Michael looked back down at him. As they sized each other up, Sara bit back another smile. The resemblance really was incredible.
She wished she could know what Henry was thinking…what conclusions he drew now. From his intense gaze, she guessed Michael wished that, too. But in the meantime, he was going to get hurt, hurling himself out of his crib at night. Better to bring him closer to the ground. "You know what, Mike?" she concluded. "I think your next project with Dad should involve building a big boy bed for your brother."
"Or we could set a trap, see if we can catch him - "
"Or rig his crib so he can't get leverage to - "
"Honestly!" Sara laughed. "Has everyone else forgotten this child is one?"