Part Ten
Life as a fugitive, it turned out, made one become unused to luxury very quickly. Michael felt a wry smile touching at the corners of his mouth as he wandered through the living room again and noted how perfect it was, how very chill. The flaw was in the occupation rather than the design, for the house had clearly been designed by someone who understood the effects of light and space. Michael still felt as if his skin did not quite fit right as he strode to and fro among the expensive furniture. He had been a prisoner in Fox River for less than two months and on the run for far less than that. Before his incarceration, he had not been ludicrously wealthy, but he had had a spacious apartment, a savings account that he was added to rather than depleted every month, and several pieces of furniture that would have made for two months rent or more when he was a child. Yet still, the house was making him feel vaguely awkward and out of place, and setting him longing for the sun and free space of the place that he had set up in Panama.
It would seem that Michael was a far different man now than he had been before his incarceration, and not merely because his feet were no longer symmetrical. It was something to think about, when he had the time for it. Michael raised his eyes towards the room that he had left only a few moments before after finding that he was not contributing anything useful to the process (a sensation that he was neither used to nor appreciated). Maybe he would even have time for it sooner than he had anticipated.
Michael smiled to himself again and turned as he heard a sound behind him, already knowing that it was going to be Sara. She had excused herself long enough to take that offered shower shortly after the investigations into her father had begun, almost eagerly. Michael thought that this might be her way of respecting his privacy, honoring the dead now when she had not been able to stay and do so properly at a funeral. She had twisted her hair back into a damp bun at the base of her neck from which damp tendrils escaped to frame her face, and she was wearing loose-fitting, borrowed clothes while her own went through a cycle in the house's washer and dryer. The bruises on her face looked fainter by virtue of being brought back into the embrace of civilization.
"Hey," Sara said, crossing her arms over her chest for a moment before she remembered herself and dropped them again. There was still a distance between them that was growing for reasons that Michael could not name. It had started just when he swore that he could feel it closing again. Sara glanced over her shoulder at the study and then quirked her eyebrows at him when she turned back around again. It was a cute gesture, and it made Michael for a moment forget. "Lincoln is the one watching the computer, and you're the one out here. Something doesn't seem right."
"Needed a break," Michael admitted.
Sara looked startled to hear it, and it truth Michael was startled to hear himself say it. At long last, she said, "I'm starving, and I'm not in the mood to ask permission. You want?"
Michael had not eaten since the day before. His tight, rigid focus on the task at hand had kept him from feeling any of the effects as more than a distant background hum. "Sure," he said.
Sara seemed to take a certain glee in rooting through a stranger's kitchen. It made Michael wonder at the other person that she could be, the one that was so radically different from both the woman in Fox River and the girl in her yearbook picture. For all that she had said that she was hungry, she appeared to be craving caffeine even more, for she went through all of the cabinets until she located coffee before she even glanced at the refrigerator. While Sara was looking at the coffee maker in order to figure out how it worked, Michael ran his fingers across the soft flesh that she had exposed to him on the nape of her neck.
"How do you feel about Panama?" Michael asked her when she had figured out the coffee maker's secrets and pressed the appropriate buttons with a flourish.
"Thought we already went over that plan, Michael," Sara said, but one corner of her mouth lifted up. They were still not used to flirting with one another; it was like an intricate dance when neither one of them quite knew the steps.
"Not to run," Michael said, warming by the second to the idea that this might really be an option now. "To vacation." He stepped closer, wrapped his arms around her from behind, and felt her stiffen for a few seconds before she relaxed and leaned into him. "I'll buy you a floppy hat and a drink with an umbrella in it."
Sara grinned and tilted her head back so that she could look him in the eyes. "Only if you promise to put zinc on your nose," she told him solemnly. "You owe me the image."
Michael let out a startled laugh. "Deal," he told her, thinking that at the moment they were nothing more than a guy and his girl, making plans for the future that they were undoubtedly going to have together. It was a nice change of pace. Sara tilted her head back until Michael thought that it would be very nice to kiss her.
Over the sound of the coffee maker gurgling, neither one of them heard Lincoln in the doorway until he cleared his throat. Michael startled as he looked over, but did not let go of Sara. Lincoln was wearing an expression that Michael would have had to punch him in the arm over if they had both still been kids. "Yes?" he asked.
Lincoln ticked his head back in the direction of the study. "You want to see this," he said. As Michael released Sara and walked past Lincoln, his brother lifted his eyebrows and grinned in such a way that made Michael think that he was still going to need to punch Lincoln, regardless.
Aldo was smiling, nearly grinning, for the first time since Michael had known him as he and Sara reentered the room with Lincoln. "Your father opened up a safe deposit box one week before he died," he informed her.
Sara's face paled for a few seconds before she could answer, as it did every time that someone mentioned her father, but she gathered herself and said, "This isn't a safe deposit key."
"No," Aldo said. "It belongs to a club in Chicago that your father has belonged to for the last fifteen years, but it still tells us where he was coming from before he died. Seems like an odd place for a man to make a casual pit stop if he found himself in the middle of a conspiracy."
"And the safe deposit box?" Sara asked.
Aldo's attempt at sparing Sara's feelings when he spoke of her father always rang with an awkward kind of sincerity, as if he had spent so much time around people who had no use for such emotional tethers that he was now having to construct the appropriate responses from memory. "It's an anomaly. That's worth checking it out."
Sara nodded, but she looked as if her mind was far away and the reaction was more a matter of reflex than of thought. Michael put his hand upon Sara's shoulder and squeezed, ignoring Lincoln, before he said, "Back into the lion's den." Where it started was where it could end. There was a neat kind of symmetry to that.
"Half of us, anyway," Lincoln said. His voice was a rumbling rasp, as if it was all that he could do to keep his emotions under control that long. Michael looked at him, then at his father, waiting for an explanation. Monica was nowhere to be seen, while Ben was striking at keys aimlessly and looking as if he would love an excuse to exit what was clearly a family affair.
"Veronica flew into Blackfoot, Montana the day before she died," Aldo said in a low voice. Hostage negotiators would use such a tone. "While President Reynolds purchased a large, remote estate just outside of Great Falls before Terrence Steadman supposedly died."
Michael exhaled and understood why Lincoln was struggling so hard to keep himself under control. "The perfect place to hide a dead man. No one around to look."
Aldo grinned, the first time that Michael had ever seen him do so. "Exactly. Half of us can go to get the recording that Governor Tancredi was killed over, and the other half can bring a dead man back to life." Michael was even willing to forgive the hyperbole, as he was feeling much the same urge even after he had only found himself embroiled in the conspiracy for a matter of months rather than decades. "We can go over separate ways tonight and meet at a neutral point when it's done."
Michael started to nod, no matter how eerie he found it that he was agreeing with his father to such a large degree, before he remembered that there were now other people with their own stakes in this. "After Alex gets back," he said. "This is his fight now, too." That was quite aside from the fact that, since he had been so good at dogging Michael's heels since Fox River, Michael would not mind seeing a master at work while he pursued someone else.
Sara and Lincoln were both watching him, Michael discovered. He ignored each stare, one because he knew what it meant and they had already had that conversation in the desert, and the other because he did not.
The front door opened and two sets of steps could be heard in the entryway. Alex Mahone also had a way with timing. Michael turned away from Sara and his brother both and went to meet Mahone, as well as Pam and the son that he had not yet met. He noticed that there were only two sets of steps when there ought to have been four; however, still flush with the realization that the conspiracy could be brought crashing down to the earth in a matter of days, he decided that Jane must be dealing with the car while either Mahone or Pam carried the child. It was late, after all.
He was half-right, and when he saw how horribly wrong he had been on the rest Michael froze in his tracks. Jane looked tired, with dark circles beneath her eyes and flecks of what Michael suspected was a mixture of blood and gunpowder marring the dove gray of her blouse and the white of her throat. Mahone-Alex, Michael corrected himself as he realized that relying on surnames when Alex was clearly now embedded into this mess as deeply as Michael and Lincoln themselves was ridiculous. Alex looked wrecked. There were lines on his face that had not been there when he had left only hours before, a sheen of sweat on his forehead and a tremble in his hands that Michael noticed right away. The hands themselves were occupied with holding a small boy of no more than five or six against Alex's chest. The boy himself had his face shoved so firmly into Alex's neck and, if the awkward way that Alex was canting his head to one side to make room for him was any indication, had been keeping it there for some time.
Though Alex was not limping, one entire leg of his trousers had been soaked with blood from the knee down. It had dried to a dark and rusty red. When Alex paused and met Michael's eyes over the top of his son's head, Michael thought that he was being given some glimpse into how that blood might have gotten there.
Monica materialized from wherever she gone in order to avoid the family drama so that she and Jane could retreat out of earshot and carry on a low, whispered conversation. Michael thought that he heard the word 'graves' being said before Monica nodded and disappeared again. She passed Aldo and shared a significant look with him as she went. Everyone in the house had drifted towards the entryway to witness Alex and Jane's return, and everyone was wearing identical expressions of shock and horror.
Michael stepped close to Alex out of some desire to keep their conversation private. He would not want to relive whatever it was that had happened in Durango in front of a crowd, and he and Alex were the same person to such a large and eerie degree, separated by a decade and a half and a few details of personal history, that Michael could not help but think it would be the same.
"Are you all right, Alex?" he asked.
Alex let out a long sigh and stroked at his son's hair. Michael liked neither the trembling in Alex's hands nor the look in his eye, which said that Durango had been such a brutal crucible that it had left only the hardest essence of the man behind. Whether than man was essentially good or essentially bad was not a question that Alex seemed particularly inclined to ask at the moment. He rolled his eyes at Michael instead. "Scofield, for someone who is supposed to be off of the charts, that is the single stupidest thing that I have ever heard you ask." Against his father's neck, the boy whose face Michael still had not seen stirred. Michael tried to imagine a five year-old with Alex's black and acerbic sense of humor, realized how much of it must have been developed by necessity as much as by nature, and was saddened.
"I meant physically," he said.
Alex met Michael's eyes long enough for some of the man to come back into them. "We're both fine," he said.
Sara was on the opposite side of the room one moment and right beside Alex and Michael the next. Michael experienced a dizzying moment in which he realized that he had not seen her move. He was accustomed to being hyperaware of Sara in every room that she happened to be in. She held her arms out for Alex to hand his son over and ignored the disbelieving glare that he received in return.
"I just want to make sure that he's not hurt," Sara said.
"We're fine," Alex repeated, though the twist of his mouth said that he at the very least understood how arguable that statement was.
Sara's level stare did the same thing. "With respect, Agent Mahone," she said in a crisp, professional tone that reminded Michael of the times in Fox River when Sara had known that he was up to something but had not been able to put the pieces together, "you yourself may be in no condition to tell. I did go to school for this."
Alex made a sighing sound that might have been much more about preparation for further argument than it was about actual defeat and seemed to notice for the first time the blood that had soaked his leg. His face went even paler as his Adam's apple worked up and down. "Fine," he gritted, and began to pull his son away from his neck so that Sara could take him. The boy cried and pushed his face further against Alex's neck. Alex's expression as he stroked at his son's hair made Michael want to look away in deference to a private moment where he was neither wanted nor needed. "Hey, hey, Cam, it's all right, buddy," he said into his son's hair. "I'm here now, I'm not going anywhere else, it's okay. This lady's a doctor. She's going to make sure that you're okay."
Cameron muttered something indistinguishable against Alex's neck, but Michael thought that he heard the word 'Mommy'. He looked towards the floor and realized that everyone else was doing the same.
"I wish she was here, too," Alex said. He reached up and gently disentangled Cameron's arms from around his neck, placing them around Sara's instead. The boy clung to her immediately, as if he could not bear any moment when he was denied human contact. Even Sara looked surprised. "But Dr. Tancredi's nice. She'll take care of you." Alex's eyes over Cameron's head promised that she had better.
Sara did not seem fazed by this, realizing that it was far more about whatever had happened while Alex was away than it was about Sara herself. She rubbed a soothing circle against Cameron's back that made Cameron burrow even harder against her before she suggested, in a gentle voice of the sort that she might use on a dog that was pacing back and forth and still deciding whether or not it wanted to be hostile, "I know that you don't want to let Cameron out of your sight, but it might clear your head if you clean up first."
Michael was certain that Alex would have disagreed had Aldo not finished listening to Aldo's swift debriefing of everything that had happened in Durango and said, "Actually, I'd like to ask you a few questions."
Alex held up a single finger and did not speak for several seconds. The digit silenced Aldo as easily as if Alex had drawn a gun. "You," Alex said in a ragged voice. "You do not want to talk to me right now." He started to walk away, paused, and came back to touch Cameron on the back of the neck. "I'm going to clean up real fast, buddy. Dr. Tancredi will look after you." Cameron said something unintelligible again, prompting Alex to say, "Good boy" before he turned towards the hall.
"Go after him, Michael," Sara said in a low voice. She was wearing her hooded eyes.
Michael did not ask how Sara thought that he could help Alex, or how she knew that Alex needed company rather than solitude at all. It would have been a foolish question; Michael had realized some time before that Alex was himself, or how he would be if the mirror had being held over a flame first. He nodded once before he followed Alex into the shadows of the hall. Aldo could get his full debriefing from Jane if he needed it so badly.
Every moment and every step that took him away from his son seemed to leech the control away from Alex and render him nearly feral instead. By the time that Michael entered what looked to be a spare bedroom behind him, he was wondering if he had really made an altogether wise decision at all. Alex was jerking his tie off in such hard, hurried movements that it was a small miracle that he had managed not to strangle himself. Michael wondered if Alex would not really like to be strangling several other people instead, perhaps starting with Michael himself. He had been like that on a few other isolated occasions in the short period of time that Michael had known him. The cage within the factory, the backseat of the stolen car. Neither of these things said that a good explanation for the blood and for the fact that Alex was notably absent an ex-wife would be coming.
Michael paused in the doorway and cleared his throat so that Alex would know that he was there, on the same logic that would lead him to alert a wounded animal to his presence before he tried to approach. The look that Alex threw him at the sound said that this had perhaps been the first wise decision that he had made since he had decided to follow Alex down the hall at all. Michael's eyes were drawn towards the blood that had soaked Alex's leg again and again. Alex looked good for a man who had been wearing the same rumpled suit for the previous two days, good in ways that made Michael's pulse quicken before he even realized that he had been looking, but he could not stop staring at the blood.
"Scofield," Alex began when he realized that the power of his glare alone was not going to be enough to make Michael turn and vanish the way that he had come. The voice was wrong, if he thought that it was going to act as a companion to his facial expression. It was his betrayer; it told a story of how hard Alex was having to fight in order to stay on his feet at all. "If you think that you are some improvement upon your father-"
No, Michael did not imagine that any member of the Burrows/Scofield family drama that was rapidly reaching the proportions of an epic Greek tragedy was a welcome sight to Alex right now. Unfortunately, a mixture of his own actions and things that had merely spun out of control while he was in the vicinity-Michael could sympathize-had sunk him as deeply into this as any of them. And Sara had been right. Michael watched the barely-controlled violence in the way that Alex threw his tie aside and knew that he did not need to be left alone.
"What happened?" Michael asked as he left the door and stepped further into the lion's den. He did not think that this lion in particular was inclined to bite, but he could not be sure.
Alex had a laugh that sounded as if he had been swallowing charcoal. It hurt Michael's ears. "And you're supposed to be the genius," Alex muttered in such a low voice that Michael wondered for a second which one of them was being addressed. "I didn't get there in time."
"Pam's dead," Michael finished. He had suspected ever since Alex had come through the door without the woman by his side, but had also needed to hear Alex say it, however much Alex's subtle flinch said that he did not appreciate it.
"Yes," Alex gritted. Finished with his tie, he began working on the buttons of his shirt before he turned an eyebrow Michael's way. "I'm taking a shower, and then I am going to see my son. If you plan on standing there and watching the entire time, do not think that that is going to be a deterrent." The charcoal grief in Alex's voice gave it a rasp that warmed Michael's blood, caused an undercurrent of danger and something else that made the air in the room crackle and twist.
Blithely strip in the bedroom where the door was still standing entirely open? From the man who had worn his tie for the previous two days and long after it had ceased to be comfortable, Michael doubted it, but that wasn't the point and even Alex must surely know that. Alex needed a target, and he couldn't get at the ones that he really wanted. Michael was providing proximity. He answered the challenge by calmly shutting the door behind him and watching Alex's eyebrow go up even higher.
"All right," Michael said, and was rewarded with a mirthless chuckle as Alex called his bluff and continued to work on the buttons of his shirt. He was lean and fit; it took Michael a moment to remember that this was not the point. "I'm sorry," he said to Alex's revealed back and watched as the muscles of the other man's shoulders contracted.
"I know that you are," Alex said in a low voice that Michael had to come closer in order to hear. Though he was moving silently, he though that Alex was still able to sense his presence, for the shoulders twitched again. "You say it often enough. It doesn't actually change the situation."
No, Michael thought, it didn't, but he could not stop thinking of Pam, or of Sara's father, or even of T-Bag's potential and actual victims. He was still adjusting to how the ripples caused by his actions could extend so far. "I'm working on that," he said.
Alex turned to look at him, finishing shrugging off his shirt, his eyes written large with pupil. Michael tasted that danger again and could not bring himself to care. He wondered if this was how Lincoln felt on a daily basis, seeing the potential consequences looming large and unable to bring himself to give a damn. If so, he was starting to understand.
"Scofield," Alex said in an even lower and hoarser voice, sounding as if he was on the verge of saying something else, before he shook his head once, hard, and brought his mouth down onto Michael's. He did not ask permission before he parted Michael's lips with his tongue and plumbed the inside of his mouth, creating long, hard sparks of I want /I that would have taken Michael's breath away if he had been altogether interested in breathing at all. He could not say that he had been taken by surprise, as his lips had been parted from the second that he had seen Alex inclining his head, but the situation itself, his own lack of resistance was something that Michael had to take a moment or two to acclimate himself to. Michael put his hand on the back of Alex's neck and pulled him sharply closer so that he could intensify their contact, heard Alex growl against his mouth in response. He was kissing Michael as if he somehow thought that Michael ought to be punished for what had happened in Durango, nearly drawing blood and causing Michael to grunt in a mixture of pleasure and pain. It was all transference, anyway; Michael did not hold it against him. He twined his fingers more tightly through Alex's hair and tugged, felt Alex's pulse through his ribcage when Michael laid his other hand flat against Alex's chest. He thought about Sara, swore that he tasted the bitter-sharp tang of transferred grief in his mouth and could not quite convince himself that this was impossible, thought about dark halves and funhouse mirrors, realized that none of this fit. Blood was rushing away from his head, and he needed desperately to breathe.
Michael jerked his head away from Alex's finally and felt his lips burning. By some mutual agreement, their foreheads were still resting against one another. Michael had to think for a moment before he remembered how to unclench his fingers, and he realized that he was having difficulty remembering how long ago it was that he had felt this sharp pull of rightness when he was with another person independently of what logic said that he ought to feel. The last one was trying to heal Alex's son only a few rooms away. Michael took a breath.
"Take a shower," he instructed Alex as he stepped away. "You'll feel better."
If Alex was feeling the same violent twist of divided emotions that Michael was certain must be written large across his own face, then he was hiding it well. His pupils had returned to their normal size as he stepped back and nodded. Without the dilation, there was nothing to mute that chill and penetrating blue. "Tell Dr. Tancredi that I'll be out in a few minutes," he said before he paused and, first inclining his head towards Michael in a gesture that could nearly be called courteous, disappeared into the bathroom. Michael exited to the sound of water running.
End Part Ten