Disclaimer: I don't own Prison Break. I have a rather love/hate relationship with the show. Since I'm borrowing the characters for my own nefarious (but non-profit) purposes, I think we're in a "love" phase.

-----

We're up to our necks in water. No, correction: I'm up to my neck; Sucre's beyond that. If it weren't for my hands cupped at the back of his head, he'd slip under.

Cold logic is telling me to let go and run. There are dogs in the woods—I can hear their baying—and the police band keeps crackling more and more dire warnings at us. The water is rising, faster than I want but slower than I'd hoped. There's no way to get his foot out from under the tree. Can't take his shoe off because it's his shin that's pinned, not his ankle. Can't lever the tree up because it's a tree, not a log. So we have to wait, and he's telling me to go. Telling me what my brain is already telling me I have to do.

Leave him.

Run.

When Linc went to prison, I tried to turn myself into a machine. Because that's what I thought I would need to be to be able to save him—always calculating, inhuman, and heartless. If I let myself get wrapped up in emotion, it would only distract me from the escape and the plan.

Seth died while I was busy pretending to be a robot. I close my eyes at night, and his body plummets over the cell block railing. His head snaps back when he reaches the end of the sheet, and the sound of vertebrae cracking echoes in my ears. Over and over and over again until I wake up screaming.

Or not, if Sucre's there. The night after Seth hung himself, I came awake with a cry that woke up half of A-wing. The other inmates started cursing and slamming things against the bars of their cells in illogical protest over the noise. I just sat there, scrunched up in the corner of my bunk, unable to get my breathing to slow. Somewhere in my sleep, Seth and I had fused—bled together into the same me—and I could still feel T-bag's hands on my back no matter how hard I pressed it against the cool, scratchy cinderblocks of the cell wall.

"Damn it, papi," Sucre said as he swung himself down off the top bunk. "You got to hold it together." He stepped over to the bars and made a hand gesture that I didn't need to see to know it was obscene and then let loose with a torrent of Spanish that only made the other prisoners yell louder.

"Hey, shut the hell up!" a bull yelled from somewhere far below. Sucre just stood there near the bars, looking out and down at something…or maybe nothing. He was weighing something in his mind, turning it over and over in his head. After so many weeks together, crammed into the same tiny space, I knew what my cellmate looked like when he was thinking too hard.

The guards were all on edge. It had been too soon since the big riot—the one I started. The one that'd gotten people killed just as surely as my refusing to help Seth had caused his plunge over the rail with a twisted sheet around his neck. The riot wasn't the same as Seth's suicide though. There'd just been too much… This cold, gray box where they kept us had turned into a war zone, and I was too relieved to be alive at the end of it, choking on tear gas, to remember anything beyond a haze of red. That and T-bag's eyes as he slit the CO's throat. The same animal eyes that had been watching me, pushing me over the rail with Seth tonight.

I gave another little cry, and that must have made up Sucre's mind. He took the sheet from his bunk and draped it across the bars of the cell. The shouts turned lewd and suggestive. Poor Sucre—not only had I dragged him into my schemes, but I'd ruined his prison rep in the process.

I told him as much when he crouched down beside the bunk, looking at me with eyes full of worry, and he told me it didn't fucking matter. I was going to get him out too—get him to his Maricruz and their baby. He pried me off that wall with hands roughened by PI work and got me to lie down again. Reminded me how a human's supposed to breathe by not breathing himself. At least, I couldn't see how he could be breathing when he was rambling so fast, some of it in English, some in his other tongue that I can still only understand a few words of: "El Diablo", after the riot. "Loco" comes up a lot when he's talking about me. "Papi", which C-Note used earlier today when Sucre ran out with the backpack. I'm not sure if any of us really knows what that word means, except Sucre.

I'd been holding myself rigid since I crossed over the threshold of Fox River, and that was the night when I finally snapped…that was when the tears came after weeks of holding them in. Leaked slowly out of the corners of my eyes and dribbled down the planes of my face. He wiped them away with his thumb. Murmured how everything would be all right. How I'd find a way to make everything all right, but first I needed to get some sleep because we had PI in the morning and a hole in St. Louis that needed digging. More Spanish, and his words formed a rhythm that prevented me from sobbing. Just let me cry quiet tears.

One wandered down along the side of my nose and somehow came to rest on my lips. He reached for that one too, the pad of his thumb brushing over my lower lip. The machine mind I'd been living in for weeks chose that moment to snap off. That's the only explanation I can find for why my lips moved and pressed themselves against his thumb.

Then the switch flipped again, and my brain reactivated in time to process what I'd just done. I felt my stomach fall out of the world at the thought that I'd just blown it with him. Probably for good this time.

But he hadn't jerked away. Instead, that soothing hand, damp with my tears, had moved around to cup the back of my head and draw our faces closer together. Kissing Sucre was never part of the plan, but it brought warmth back into my life. Warmth that'd turned into heat as we kept coming back to that place.

Now, I'm literally holding his life in my hands the way he held my sanity that night back in prison. If I do what he's telling to me do—if I run and save myself—then he'll drown. I can't let that happen. No, not to Sucre. So, I'll stay here, by his side, as the water rises and the authorities close in. Because it's Sucre—the man I taught to spell 'passion' and the man who showed me what that really was.