You reap what you sow.
Lincoln kneels. He doesn't know if this is prayer. It's not like anything Father Mike taught him at St. Lucia, that's for sure.
If anything, it feels like silence. Like peace. Like rest. A stillness he can't find when he's locked in the ten by ten cell and all his thoughts and fears rebound from the walls, driving him mad by inches with their echoes.
He's not unaware of the irony. After his mother's death, he'd fled the church, no longer able to stomach the rites of the God that let her die, leaving him and Michael all alone. Oh, he'd still made his sketchy attendance at Sunday Mass, but in any sense that mattered, he'd been anywhere but there. And now here he is again, trying to relearn what it's like, to listen for the voice of God.
The sermon is one that's repeated frequently; contrition and repentance key steps on the redemptory road that the prison would set their feet. And Lincoln knows how well this particular message fits him.
He hasn't sown well. He never set out to be a bad man or an evil man, but in some ways, he thinks that might be worse than the alternative. His sins are ones of carelessness and heedlessness, a sloppy ring of ruin that could have been easily avoided if he'd spent one moment to actually take stock of what he was doing. Seeds of sloth, seeds of anger, seed spilled careless between a woman's thighs…
He doesn't want to die, but sometimes he wonders if he deserves it.
"No! Mom! Mom!"
He comes awake in startled terror and promptly gets a fist in the nose. "Dammit!"
His anger dissolves at once when he realizes it's Michael. He doesn't think Michael's spent a single full night in his own bed since Mom died, which means, of course, Linc hasn't had a bed to himself in that same amount of time…but he doesn't mind.
"You take care of your brother, Lincoln Burrows, you hear me?" his mother had said, her voice raspy and cloudy with sickness and drugs. Her hand whittled down to a vulture's claw, she clutched his hand, the skin hot and papery. "Michael needs you. You need each other."
Sometimes, Linc thought the feel of her hand would be forever imprinted on his, an invisible brand that goes to the bone, marking not ownership, but responsibility.
"Mike…" He doesn't shake the younger boy, just puts his hand on Michael's shoulder. "Mike, wake up. It's just a dream. Wake up."
Michael's eyes startle open. "M… Linc?" Hard to believe he can sound so sleepy and so scared in one breath.
"Yeah, man. You were dreaming." He smoothes a hand over Michael's hair, the way Mom used to. "You were just dreaming."
Michael takes a deep, hitching breath. "She's really gone, isn't she?"
"Yeah." Lincoln's eyes burn hot for a second, but he blinks the feeling away. "But I'm still here."
"Dad…"
"No, LJ." Lincoln holds up his hands, tucked by the cuffs and chains. "This is important, and I'm not going to get the chance to say it again. I screwed up. I screwed up, and that's the load I've got to carry. But my screw-ups don't have to carry over to you. You're grandmother was an amazing, wonderful woman, and I wish to God I'd had the sense to be more like her." He puts his hand flat against the glass, willing the boy to understand. No matter how things turn out, this may be his last chance to get this right. "You don't have to be like me."
"I'm not like you," LJ replies with the particular viciousness of teenagers.
Irritation makes a vein throb in Lincoln's forehead, but he reins his anger back. He doesn't have time to be angry. "You're right," he agrees, though he doesn't believe it. LJ may not look much like him, but in every other sense, it might as well be a mirror on the other side of the glass. That bloody-minded, inflexible streak goes right to the bone. "I'm just trying to tell you that you have choices. It doesn't always seem like it, and sometimes you don't spot it until afterwards, but they're there. You can always pick which way you want to go…and just because you've chosen one thing doesn't mean you have to stick with it all the way to the end. This end."
"Well, you don't need to worry, okay?" LJ says, avoiding Lincoln's eyes. "I'm fine. Everything's fine."
Lincoln nods. "I know. But things don't stay fine. And when they're not fine, I just want you to remember." He takes a deep breath. "I never asked you for much—because I didn't have the right to. I know I was a shitty dad." LJ's eyes dart up to his, startled to hear him just come out and say it. "I'm asking you…just remember. Please."
"Yeah, all right?"
"Promise me."
LJ rolls his eyes. "Yeah, Dad, I promise."
"I told you we could do it, Linc!" Michael claps him on the shoulder, eyes alight. "I said it would work!"
"Yeah, man, you're a fucking genius, okay?" Sucre shivers. "Now can we go?"
Lincoln says nothing, conscious as never before of his lungs expanding and deflating in his chest. They always said the air tastes different, out of the slam. It wasn't a cliché he'd ever thought he'd have the chance to explore.
It's true.
"C'mon…we've got to keep moving." Michael tugs at his arm, and Lincoln allows himself to be towed for a moment before he comes back to himself and starts to run.
He never expected this—who could? But more than the escape, he'd never expected Michael to come for him, to come through for him like this. It had always been his job to protect Michael, and good, bad, or indifferent, he'd never expected to have the tables turn on him so thoroughly.
"He needs you," his mom had said, that last night. When he thought about it, he could still feel the pressure and heat of her hand, decades later. "You need each other." You reap what you sow.