Chapter 13 Over the Top

Garden, closed ward, St Agatha's, in the heat of a summer afternoon

The sun is all over the garden again and Michael feels almost too good to be true. He doesn't remember when was the last time he felt that way. Then again, he doesn't remember that much of his life at all. He'd ask Kelly about it if he wasn't too proud to beg, and if he believed that she'd tell him the truth to start with. He'd ask Sara if he wasn't afraid of what she might tell him and how it could influence the best thing that has happened to him since he woke up in St Agatha's and wiggled the toes he still has.

There is another way, he thinks, and he's quite serious about it. As serious as he can be, and he's got a strong suspicion he can be much more serious about things than most people. Persistent. Overly-efficient. Insane. It's a possibility he really needs some kind of brain treatment, and he's terrified of contemplating it rationally.

Michael has to have more than the first name. He has to have a last name. And then the computers in the room they use to watch him, which have become as easily accessible as the toilet in Michael's own single bedroom, will tell him everything he needs to know.

Without having to ask anyone.

Priorities are however different. He should be working on a plan, he knows, but he's not. The warm smell of freshly mowed grass is distracting his senses, and the ton of perceptions he's unwillingly picking up from his surroundings stimulates rest, and sleep, still badly needed after a night spent crawling in the floor heating system and… Well… He'd still be at it if he could. And if he gets out of St Agatha with Roger, he imagines he can spend as much time with Sara as they both like. It's definitely something to look forward to.

So he whistles cheerfully towards Sucre as soon as he sees him from afar, assuming his usual gardening position in the other part of the St Agatha's greenery, where those same three patients quarrel again about the usefulness of the sinister medical procedures performed. Roger's absence is conspicuous, there will be one more mortal victim of the state of the art clinic if Michael is unable to work fast.

"Hey," he says, when Fernando comes to him without any hesitation, smiling as a true friend might. "How are you?" he asks for the sake of asking. If you are using people, you could just as well be nice to them, Michael believes firmly, suppressing the guilt of using them in the first place.

"Could be better, papi," Fernando says and waits. As if he knows him good enough to know that Michael always needs something from people. A fact that doesn't make him too proud about himself at all, but which is undeniable, and maybe, maybe, it has helped him survive in the past. It has to help him now, because there's no one really he can rely on but himself. And now his resourcefulness and willingness to do the good thing by any means necessary might help an honest looking man not to undergo a cerebral lobotomy or whatever is being done to the patients of the St Agatha's closed ward, in the name of some abstract public good Michael never believed in.

"Do you have any idea where they keep Roger, you know, a bit older guy, the one who doesn't want this operation?" Michael asks innocently.

"I do," Fernando says, "on the ground floor from the other side of the wing they keep you in. But, man, he's weird,"

"How?" Michael asks.

"He's pulling all those faces in front of a mirror," Sucre is cautious but Michael knows there is more to it. There has to be. "As if he's a circus guy or something."

"Any way to get him out of there? What do you think?"

Sucre looks up, and Michael follows his gaze. Kelly is staring at them from one of the windows on the top floor right above them. Her face is a mask of quiet indifference. She could be sun bathing or day dreaming the way she looks, sharp black hair in contrast with a white doctor's coat, if the sharp gaze of her black eyes did not betray the center of her attentions. Michael and Sucre, without any doubt.

"Well," Fernando says, measuring his words. "Either through the clinic and then to some door, or over the roof, I'd say from where we are now."

Michael looks up too, but he doesn't pay attention to Kelly. He studies all the walls of the precinct he can see, not only the one he went under to find the best thing in his life. He knows he has to do something Kelly Davis and the builders of the place he's in did not take into their calculations. In any construction, there are always little things not accounted for. Things that will help him do what needs to be done. The walls are meticulously secured on the top, that much is more than clear. But there is this new idea in Michael's head, developing into something bigger ever since Sucre had mentioned it: the circus guy. And the roof of the building looks rather innocent. Like a roof and nothing more. It could be his impression, of course, and as soon as he's able to, he'll have to check himself.

The expression on Fernando's face freezes again. Precisely at the moment when the ugly patient, Theodore Bagwell, walks out to approach the two who are eagerly waiting for the procedure, unlike Roger ever was. Bagwell is a bit older than both Fernando and Michael. He has an artificial hand, and on that day his eyes look, well, dead, as Michael imagines a genuine serial killer should look. He hopes he will never look that way.

"Jesus Christ," Fernando says without thinking, "next thing we'll see Lincoln imprisoned again, or Abruzzi coming from the dead."

"Who's Lincoln?" Michael asks vehemently back because that name sounds important. More important than Roger.

The gardener doesn't answer him, but his warm brown eyes turn all emotional from Michael's question as if the fact that Michael doesn't know who Lincoln is might make him cry on the spot.

"What is important," Fernando says slowly, "is that Lincoln is not here and not waiting for any procedures. Lincoln is free, Michael. Think of that."

And then, just like Michael and Sucre noticed the ugly patient, he seems to be discovering their presence in the clinic for the very first time. Michael realizes he's standing in the sun without his peculiar straw hat on for the first time since he woke up. He must have been so lost in his memories of Sara that he never picked it up from his room, forgetting he could get sick again if he didn't cover his head. The look of shock on the ugly patient's face is prominent, and instantly replaced with a kind of mean satisfaction. He would walk to them, Michael knows. But only the gardener is allowed to the part of the premises where the people from St Agatha keep Michael locked up, so the newcomer can only come so far: to the fence closest to where Fernando and Michael are standing.

"Fish," he tells them, and Michael is not sure whom he is addressing. "I heard you died."

"So did I," Michael responds evenly, feigning indifference, earning a look of admiration from his Portorican friend.

"Glad you didn't, though," the ugly man says. "Listen, ya, I know we didn't see eye to eye in the past. But that's all in the past, okay?" The man rolls his eyes in desperation that doesn't look fake. Everything else about him looks fake, though, Michael concludes.

"Now I want in, okay?" the man says, "I'll do anything you need, no surprises… I promise!"

"No suprises…" Michael says coldly. "Now why does that surprise me?"

Fernando chuckles and says, pointedly: "Because T-Bag is full of surprises."

Then, Michael is surprised. If Fernando knows this… T-Bag… Does Sucre know Michael too? Do they all know him? And is he the only idiot who's being manipulated into doing god knows what for someone else's account while he has no idea who he is.

"I'll think about it, T-Bag," Michael says with authority in his normally calm voice. "On the condition that you leave us now."

"As you say, fish," T-Bag says, spreading his arms wide, palms open towards them, in sign of surrender and good will. Faster than necessary, he backs off to the other two patients, the older and the younger one, who seem perfectly at ease in St. Agatha's, enjoying the sun. As if nothing wrong has ever happened in the damn clinic.

When he is far enough, Michael pierces Fernando with his blue-green look and asks with the same determination he used to get rid of T-Bag: "Tell me my last name."

Fernando looks to the ground, looks up where Kelly is spying on them. Looks to the ground again. Finds the courage he's missing, somewhere. When he dares to return Michael's look, straight in the eye, his own eyes are almost tearing again, for the second time that afternoon.

"You're not feeling well, are you," he stutters and makes a step back, provoking Michael, who somehow understands that what Fernando needs at that moment is for Michael to confirm his story. Michael stumbles forward, nearly pulling Sucre to the ground, and ae he does it, a glossy paper is being stuck in his pants, under the too dark grey T-shirt they are making him wear despite the heat, while the other patients are being dressed in more suitable lighter clothing. T-Bag has an immaculately white T-shirt and somehow the colour doesn't fit him at all.

"I'll call the attendants," Fernando says, gesturing to Ms Davis above.

When they bring him back to his room, when they lay him forcefully in bed and administer him some calming product, Michael lies in a foetal position resigned with the fact he'll have to wait until he wakes up, and the stuff they injected him leaves his system. He'll waste another day he doesn't have. Another day when he didn't reach Roger, who may have been murdered in the meantime for all he knows.

Hours later, when he is awake and alone, he goes to the corner of his room that the camera is unable to record in detail, and retrieves Fernando's gift. It's a photograph of a grave. The image is unusually clear, and the inscription on a rather simple gravestone says:

MICHAEL J. SCOFIELD

10. 9. 1974. - 11. 4. 2005.

Husband, Father, Brother, Uncle, Friend

Be the change you want to see in the world

He wonders which of those things he was, or still is, to Fernando.

And what he was, or still is, to Sara.

She's the change I want to keep in my world, he knows at least that, as he patiently waits for the hour to be late enough to go to the computers and find out who he is and what he did in his previous life.

xxxxxx

Washington DC, near the governmental premises which are not supposed to exist

The register of special agents answering directly to the Oval Office is an even more innocuous place than the one Mahone and Lincoln visited before.

It's housed in an apartment block of at least 200 apartments and 20 floors, somewhere in the middle of a completely mediocre building no one would relate to anything of any importance. But the floor where it is hidden has a double layer of most advanced physical protection. The walls and the door are reinforced against any attack. No one can access it, except for a few holders of the special limited edition of biometric cards, only three at the time, and they are exchanged on duty every six months. Than the new cards are issued and the new guards come.

"The staff does not know what they are maintaining", Mahone tells Lincoln. "It's safer that way for everyone. They think it's some register of war veterans or something, for their pensions or similar rights."

"How do we get in?" Lincoln asks, more blunt than usual. They are wasting time and they should go back to Montana before something happens to Sara and Mikey. He's got to get her out of there. He owes that and much more to his little brother.

"Only one of us does," Mahone informs him as they take the stairs all the way to the roof, avoiding the elevators and the floor they need to break in as widely as possible. "The main water pipes run through the building in a single shaft behind all the toilets. Even if where we have to go the toilet is not in usage. But it's most likely the least protected door of the premises."

Lincoln doesn't know how he got himself into that. If they catch them, he's sure to go to prison again. Not a place he wants to go ever again in his life. Yet he obediently nods and agrees with Mahone's visionary stare, as he is lowered down the shaft on a special thin chain used to scale mountains. In a small backpack he carries a drill, a special model that emits no sound. It should do to drill one hole through the lock of the toilet. Theoretically, that should open the door, and once he leaves, the servicemen of the register should not notice immediately that something has happened and even less that there had been an intrusion.

Arriving to the correct toilet is easy, entering the secret office is almost too easy too. Everything is going too much according to the plan. He has 25 minutes alone in the apartment during the change of shift, the time it takes for one employee to descend to the ground floor, exchange some kind of login book with his colleague, and for his colleague to take the elevator and come up.

Typing Kelly's full name in the only computer which is switched on in the meticulously tidy office gives no result, just like Mahone predicted.

Lincoln follows Alex' second instruction. He slides Kelly's a recent photograph in an odd looking scanner next to the screen and waits.

And that is the moment when all goes wrong as the best plans usually do. As soon as the machine has swallowed the photograph entirely, all equipment, even the one that seemed switched off, starts beeping and blinking. No information is displayed, but one of the empty screen turns red, as are a few buttons on a keyboard.

An alarm that Lincoln was not supposed to trigger by entering through the toilet goes off in all its magnificence and glory. 25 minutes will become less now, he knows. Michael would be able to calculate Linc's exact odds to get out before he gets arrested, if he was alive.

Lincoln wishes Michael was alive, but he still prefers not knowing the odds. For him, now knowing gives him the strength to fight and run away before it's too late.

When he touches the toilet door, the alarm screams even higher, and he's unable to open it. Violently, he drills more holes in the door ignoring the sound. Everyone will know there was a burglary, and his fingerprints will be all over the place because he is careless enough to drill without gloves at that moment.

Linc doesn't care.

I'll never even make a professional criminal, he thinks bitterly. A failure in everything. Michael, Sofia and LJ would disagree, he knows. But Michael is not among the leaving, and Sofia and LJ are far away.

His effort and his frustration pays out because he is out of the toilet before anyone comes in, and soon he's back on the roof.

They run away, as they did so many times in the past years, and Mahone doesn't even dare ask him how it went for a very long time.

Too long time.

Mahone finally asks him, when they are half way back to Montana, using the least important roads they can find, in the third car they exchanged on the way.

"Her photograph, it caused the havoc," Mahone says.

"You knew?" Lincoln asks and the fury almost gets the better of him. It's lucky for Alex that Linc is the one driving. He's driving way too fast to get back to Sara on time, and he's not eager to end his life by driving off the road. If not, he'd beat the hell out of Mahone for what he made him do, in full knowledge of how it might turn.

"I was hoping I was wrong," Alex says and the words come out weak, almost like a confession. "Sometimes I'm so sorry when I'm right about things."

The humbleness of the former agent calms Linc somewhat down. "What does that mean? " he asks, trying to be rational, when he's not being good at that at all.

"One of the two," Mahone answers with caution. "Or Kelly Davis is one of the top class criminals in this world, that the inner circle of any President of the United States is monitoring carefully because you never know when they might pose a threat."

"Or?" Lincoln wants to hear it all and, wonders what can be worse.

It can always get worse.

"Or she is one of the President's best special agents entrusted with a special task involving national security. And in performing this task she has no need to abide by any laws…"

"Can she be both?" Lincoln asks.

"It's rare," Mahone says, "but not unheard of."

Lincoln is unable to tell which of the three possibilities frightens him more.

He steps on it, and drives further. The car jerks forward, and the night shadows thicken.

Montana is still too way far away.

xxxxxxx

The computer room used to watch Michael Scofield, very late at night

Michael Scofield stares at the computer screen where his previous life had unfolded in front of his frozen eyes.

At least I'm not a murderer, he smiles without feeling any joy. He knows half of the stuff recorded by the media is an outright lie or at least facts made up bigger to appeal to the public, to reach record audiences in no time. The life he discovered doesn't feel like his own, yet the facts are irrefutable. The leader of the Fox River Eight.

No, he hasn't murdered yet, but he had set murderers free. And Sara, his wife, had murdered his mother to protect him.

Why didn't you tell me? he asks her in his head. He asks it of himself too, and he cannot find an answer. He should crawl through the floors and seek her out, if she's in her office at all. After the night before he believes she would be.

But if she could not tell him, maybe there is a reason. Maybe she wants a new start, maybe the past is too difficult to mention, maybe seeing him alive is too much.

Maybe she lost the child, and she's unable to tell me that.

Sara Scofield has disappeared from the media, and the computer cannot tell him if they have a boy or a girl or if they had a child at all. But the photograph of his grave calls him a father, too, among other things, so he must have become one after his disappearance…

Maybe she doesn't want his child to meet his father.

When he thinks of that, he's unable to see her, he can't see her, he has to sleep first with the terrible thought. He doesn't want to hurt her by voicing his suspicions, yet they are there, and he's too selfish to get rid of them and just believe in her.

There's another place he can go to, using the floor heating, and another man who needs, and probably deserves his help.

The computer is helpful with that, at least, and the preparatory room for the special procedures shows clearly on the plans of St Agatha's. He retouches a little the drawings he has made earlier on his body, and gets on his way.

Xxxxxx

Roger's room, ground floor of St Agatha's closed ward

When Michael's head comes up through the floor of the room where they keep Roger, the strong man with greying hair immediately sits up on his bed, very similar to Michael's. The chair is in the right hand corner, facing the open window. The smell of roses comes through it at night, sweet and sickening.

The chair is what Michael Scofield knows it to be, it's what they wanted to do to Lincoln, it's what they once put Lincoln in until, miraculously, his death sentence was postponed. There is a vague trace of dust from the chair to the door of the room, somewhat visible in the moonlight. As if it has been brought recently to the room. Michael stores the fact in his mind where he compiles all other unnecessary, often burdening data. He doesn't know what to make of it for the moment.

Why do they need an electric chair for a brain surgery? he wonders. A ridiculous thought comes to mind: Maybe I was in such chair to while Dr Davis operated me.

He has to stop thinking because the older man is awake, looking at Michael with blatant honesty in his eyes.

"I need to get you out of here," Michael informs Roger, without sparing the man a further, more detailed look, not even bothering to completely enter the room. He has wasted enough precious time that day on his personal heartaches and it's time to have a plan. "When is she going to operate on you?"

"In two days, I think," Roger says, "three at most. She has been a bit indisposed in the last two days, and she needs to make it look legal. Otherwise her employers will discontinue the money for her research and stop sending her patients."

"You mean," Michael says coldly, "she has to kill you in such a way that it looks that there could be a major breakthrough, in a sense that she might have some positive results with her next patient?"

"Something like that," Roger admits.

"And who's her next patient? T-Bag?" Michael asks furiously, both willing and unwilling for Theodore Bagwell to end his miserable life like Mr Morris did.

"T-Bag? Who's that?" Roger is genuinely surprised, and his wise-looking eyes narrow, almost changing hue. Michael is too tired to attribute any importance to the gesture but he registers it in the back of his mind together with the pattern and colour of Roger's curtains, and every last detail of his room. There is no obvious way Roger can go out through the window with the security features in place. The floor heating system is an option, but it will not get them to the point from where they can climb the roof. And pretend to be circus guys, both of them, in order to break out, if only for a few hours.

Michael's head starts spinning, and hurting. He hopes, no, he prays, it's not cancer again. The only heritage he has from his mother. He hopes the headache is due exclusively to a too big amount of singular perceptions he's not yet been able to put in a coherent order, to get to a plan he needs. A plan to save Roger and to fool St Agatha, as he had once fooled Fox River.

"Has T-Bag been in the preparatory room?" Roger asks another question, more insistently than the first one.

"Never mind who he is, and I have no idea where he's been or not. I don't run this place, or its schedules. I've never heard of the preparatory room either, " Michael says. "We'll be leaving in two days. Let's hope that you're right about your operation date."

"Thank you," Roger says fervently, and there is no lie in his voice. There's no deliberate withholding of information from Michael, as both Fernando, his friend, and Sara, his wife, had done.

"I'll never be able to repay you the favor," Roger says and he has to mean it. People are mostly unable to lie that well.

His gratitude is genuine, and Michael feels a bit better about himself, hoping that he's right and that he's letting a good man out of prison. When he returns to his room, he's exhausted, and unable to proceed with checking the roof that night, but his mind cannot stop working, joining the many small puzzles together in a perfect, flawless plan. A coherent construct of his mind.

It's only before his eyes betray him, and in the minute before he falls asleep, that his desires can no longer be contained.

I should have gone to you tonight, he thinks and hopes he may see her in his sleep, see the two of them together in his dreams that night.

He regrets being a coward.

And he misses Sara.

A/N Thank you to all who reviewed :-)) Please say something about this chapter as well. It's not a very happy one, but sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. The story will continue but the updates are now going slower.