AN- Thank you so much for all the input! Lydia12, Death by Teacup, Lynn Llewllyn, moonwolf0, I appreciate you taking the time to review. :) Oh, Lynn, I realized my mistake that night when I was just getting ready to go to bed. :P It'll be fixed soon, but it won't be anything that'll change the entire storyline. ;) Speaking of storylines, I have no idea where this is going! It's just fun to write. LoL.

I love music... it's great. Good music makes you feel different things. Like mushy or sad, angry or happy. I like it all if it can do that to me. That's why the majority of my stories always start out with a snippet from a song.I blame it entirely oniRiver. It's there fault for letting me buy one of their MP3 players. Especially one with 20 gigs to hold all the music to my hearts content.20 gigs... its just not enough...

Disclaimers- Property of Fox Studios. Not mine. I just borrow for my own sick, twisted amusement.

Warning; Some swearing, some smooching, some nostalgia. Some spoilers, but we knew that already, didn't we?

This is over my head
But underneath my feet
Cause by tomorrow morning I'll have this thing beat
And everything will be back to the way that it was
I wish that it was just that easy.
Somewhere in Between
By Lifehouse

Michael turned his head and surveyed the dismal doctor's office where he sat waiting for his insulin shot.

She stood before a cabinet, fiddling with something and he couldn't believe that she was actually humming something. He had heard it before, it was a soft and sappy song, one of those songs that was played for the last song at a dance. Michael's eyes slid from her back to the floor as she turned around with the syringe in hand.

Outside, he could hear the restless pacing of the guards. He could see a dark clad shoulder leaning over the frosted glass.

Always courteous, always professional, Doctor Sara Tancredi came over and sat beside him with a tray that held a syringe and swabs of cotton with alcohol on it. "How is your foot?"

"Fine." Michael said, his eyes on the syringe as it punctured his flesh.

"I want to take a look at it." She said, pushing the liquid into his veins and withdrawing the needle.

"You are in a good mood today." He noted calmly, carefully prying off his boot.

She turned and smiled at him, "I've got a date tonight."

Raising an eyebrow, Michael smirked, "And here I thought it was me..." His first attempt at humour and he was already exhausted from the effort.

They succumbed in a uncomfortable silence. Michael sat back, his eyes on the doctor as her cool hands slid over his bandaged foot, carefully unwrapping the wound. "It looks like the stitches were ripped open. What happened, Michael?"

"I stubbed it." He lied, the shuttered look on his face expressing his unwillingness to talk about it.

She sighed in frustration. "I'm going to have to restitch this."

Michael nodded.

"You know, I should try and chastise you for this but I know that it's going to be useless."

"And you think that by chastising a convicted felon really will make a difference? You are a brave woman, Tancredi."

Shrugging, her hands skimmed over the wound. "It could be misconstrued as stupidity, but I'm an optimist."

Michael leaned down, letting the humour show on his face. Sara looked up slowly, feeling his eyes on her. "I'm sure you like to surprise people, don't you?" His voice was low and quiet as he watched her.

She felt uncomfortable with the closeness but found herself strangely attracted to the severeness of his expression. Of all the inmates that she treated, he had been the most enigmatic... the most inconsistent... and that in itself was a potent mixture. He wasn't uneducated-- far from it, and it seemed from his file that he wasn't prone to violence– with the exception of discharging a weapon at the bank he had intended to rob.

Glancing up at his face, she could see that he was pale and withdrawn. Sweat beaded and slid down his face as she stitched it closed again. He wavered in the chair and she sat up, frowning at him, this wasn't supposed to happen. Michael pitched forward in the chair, his body falling against hers and causing them both to topple to the floor.

"Michael!" She said softly, reaching up to take his pulse. It was rapid but strong.

He lifted his head and realized who was beneath him thenrolled onto his back and blinked away dizziness. "I'm sorry, Doc. Didn't know what came over me."

She leaned over him with a flashlight and watched his pupils contract in the light. "What's happening?"

"Just a bit dizzy." He rubbed his face as the lightheadedness ebbed away.

She looked at him suspiciously, "When was the last time you had a full night's sleep?"

He shrugged.

"Let me guess, you haven't had a full night since you got here."

He couldn't have a full night. Especially with things going as they were. He needed to be fully awake in order to get things done. Deciding to take the matter in hand, Michael sat up quickly, too quick for Sara to move out of the way. His hands reached around her waist, pulling her close as he glanced over her shoulder to the door where he could see the guard leaning against the frosted glass.

Their lips crashed together in heated desperation. She struggled momentarily but to his surprise, succumbed to the tight lock around her body. The kiss grew soft, the violence of it ebbed away much to her relief. His teeth nipped at her bottom lip, begging entrance. She gasped at the sensation and found her hands cupping the back of his head as his tongue tentatively brushed against her open mouth.

A knock at the door brought both crashing back to their senses. They stood and adjusted clothing, avoiding each other out of guilt. "Well, Mr. Scofield, I think we're done here." She muttered, watching him put on his sock and boot.

The door opened and Captain Bellick stalked in. "He ready to go?"

She nodded, "Yes. I had to restitch the wound on his foot."

Michael stood and followed the guards out of the infirmary, back into the main building. Hands gripped the front of his shirt and slammed him against a brick wall. The rest of the guards respectfully averted their gazes as the Captain leaned in and glared at the inmate, "Snitch on me, did you Fish?"

Spearing him with a dark look, Michael said softly, " I don't know what you're talking about. I stubbed my foot."

Hands eased from his shirt and roughly patted his face. "Good Fish. Finally learning whose the bitch, huh?"

((PB))

When the bars slammed closed and the lights went out, Michael lay staring up at the lines on the mattress above him. He smiled, a small secretive smile as he remembered what it felt like to kiss a woman after months of self-imposed deprivation. It felt good.

He liked women with spice, with a little fire and had immediately condemned the quiet, intelligent yet very beautiful Sara Tancredi as docile as a doe. She wasn't. He was sure that if he had told her so, she'd deny it vehemently, saying that it went against all that she believed. But there was no denying that she had responded to his aggressiveness with a little bit of her own.

Jerking his head away from the dim light that filtered in between the bars of his cage, Michael stared at the bare concrete wall and tried to put his thoughts in order. He shouldn't have been thinking about a woman when his brother's life was on the line.

Anger and shame spiked through his veins, any happiness that he would have felt for that morning's conquest suddenly filtered away.

"I can't believe you did that, Linc!" Atwelve-year-old Michael cried angrily.

His brother glared down at him, his eyes alight with his own anger and something that Michael would have guessed as fear. "I did it because he hurt you, Mikey!"

"You did it because you liked it." Michael scoffed as the police's lights flashed in the livingroom hallway.

"I didn't..." Lincoln muttered, "He hurt you." His hands, hands that were capable of beating a person half to death, gently brushed the bruise that peppered Michael's jaw a sickly purple hue.

Michael jerked his head away from his older sibling's touch, feeling only disgust and betrayal at what he had done. His dad had left him with only fleeting memories and a Christmas card he had gotten when he was six. The fatherly role had landed with a heavy thud, on Lincoln's shoulders at the young age of nine, Michael had beenfive at the time.

Michael whispered, too angry to find his voice. "You are just going to leave like dad did."

"I'm not going to leave you, Mikey."

"What do you call this!" He yelled, nodding his head towards the window where a police cruiser sat parked on the side of the road. "I don't give fuck about some stupid guy beating me up! But you had to go and almost kill him! Now, you are going to go and I'm not going to have anyone."

"I'm sorry, kid." And he had meant it far more than Michael's young brain could ever concieve.

The door knocked and Lincoln swung it open. Two swarthy police officers stood in the doorstep, their eyes instantly locking on him. "Are you Lincoln Burrows?"

"Yes officer."

A hand reached out and grabbed his forearm, wrenching it behind his back. "Your under arrest for the assault of Jake Turner, anything you say..."

Michael jerked awake, his entire body surging upwards as he woke from his nightmare. He eased back down on his bunk and tried to calm himself, tried to think of anything that would help ease the pain of that memory as it surged through his mind.

If only Lincoln hadn't beaten that kid up... where would they be?

But Lincoln had come back from Riverside a juvenile hall in Chicago a year later, completely changed. There was something silent and hard about him, like some part of his innocence had died. It was something that Michael had recognized on a sub-conscious level, making him wary of the stranger that inhabited his brother. He had demons, real and terrible that wouldn't go away. Lincoln drank and became destructive. The bond that each brother held had become so thin and overtaxed that eventually it became non-existent. If they hadn't shared the same blue eyes and the same tilt of the head, no one would have guessed they were brothers.

'Shame about the other one though...' People would whisper behind Michael's back as he fought for the best grades and impeccable attendance records that made his mother weepwith joy. He graduated valedictorian from MPHS and had moved on quickly to Loyola, striving to gain some distance from his family.

Six years later, he hadn't heard or seen of his brother, spoken to his mother briefly and graduated from Loyola with his degrees in Civil and Structural engineering. He was shocked to find his brother in the audience when he went up to receive his certificates. He had changed due to the presence of the immaculate, almost saintly Veronica Donovan. Michael wondered how in the hell Lincoln had met such a perfect and successful woman. It was almost too impossible to conceive and he was ashamed to admit that he was waiting for his brother to screw up soon– which was inevitable.

A year after graduating from Loyola and attaining a prominent job for a reputable company, Michael had absolutely refused to have anything to do with Lincoln after landing himself in jail for drug trafficking and thereby ruining any good chances he had with the beautiful lawyer. To make matters worse, Michael found out by his motherthat Lincoln had ason by a different woman.

LJ Burrows reminded Michael a lot of himself at that age. He felt bad for the kid, who had become mixed up his father's penchant for drama and bad run-ins with the law. After landing in jail, Michael was not surprised (but a little disappointed) to hear that LJ had experienced a run-in with the law himself after intending to traffic marijuana. He wanted to slap the boy, but he knew what LJ was going through and completely commiserated with his wayward nephew. Lincoln Burrows always had that affect on people. He always brought out the bad in anyone and if not, they quickly grew wise and moved on.

Blood is thicker than water, he remembered someone telling him once. Indeed it was and in his current situation, he couldn't agree with it anymore. Deep within the heart of Fox River, Michael knew better than anyone how thick blood was.

TBC