More Than It Seems

by mooyoo

For Michael’s eighth birthday their mother bought him a complete set of The Chronicles of Narnia and Lincoln could swear his brother was just about ready to die with excitement.

Title: More Than It Seems

Fandom: Prison Break

Characters: Michael & Lincoln

Prompt: 068: Lightening

Word Count: 2,444

Rating: G

Summery: For Michael's eighth birthday their mother bought him a complete set of The Chronicles of Narnia and Lincoln could swear his brother was just about ready to die with excitement.

Disclaimer: Paul Scheuring and a whole lot of other people who aren't me own Prison Break.

Lincoln loved to read when he was young. When he was very small he refused to go to bed without having one of his parents read to him first, and by the time he was five he was going through everything he could gets his hands on, just in time for his father to take off and his mother to become preoccupied with his new brother. H.A. Rey, Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, he adored. When she had the time his mother read to him CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien while two-year-old Michael watched from his perch inside his playpen nearby. Seven-year-old Lincoln cared nothing for deeper meanings, religious subtext, or historical allusions, delighting in the great, heroic, epic battles between good and evil, with good always emerging victorious.

Lincoln read stories of magic and fantasy and excitement and adventure where the mighty heroes were always good and loyal and kind, and rewarded with eternal happiness, riches, love in the end. By the time he realized that such adventures would never find him, that such stories were simply stories, his interest in books was already beginning to fade. Books were more or less useless, he reasoned during his adolescence; reading was fine but pointless – it didn't earn you any money, didn't put food on the table, didn't get you the new radio you wanted or a trip to sunny Hawaii. Great, noble heroes didn't exist in a world where your father beat you up or your mother had to work three jobs to exhaustion.

Lincoln lost his patience for reading after a while, couldn't focus on a book for more than twenty minutes before his eyes would glaze over and his mind would drift off. Sitting still was no longer comfortable, he was always feeling slightly agitated, slightly on edge. Needed to more, move, move, do things – run and punch and talk and clap and smoke and push and swing and kick and fight and hug and a million other things that were not sit and scan a page full of words.

Adventures in the real world were stealing, smoking, fighting, sneaking, and didn't come with any of the magic and virtue his books had promised. He loved to run, loved to play football and get into fights. He made up stupid jokes with his mother and loved to kiss his girlfriend. He stole radios out of cars and anyone who looked at his brother sideways got a fist to the face. He knew smoking made him look older, and by the time he was fourteen he couldn't remember what he'd liked so much about reading.

There was nothing magical in the real world, and really, who had the time to waste on reading anyway with school and a job and friends and a girlfriend and a mother who worked 58 hours per week and a brother to take care of and meals to fix and laundry to do.

Michael loved to read when he was young. Lincoln watched his brother as a four-year-old struggling with the letters, pushing Lincoln away when the older boy would offer to read the book for him. Michael slowly worked through the words scattered across one of the pages of Yertle the Turtle, carefully sounding out "The turtles had everything turtles might need. And they were all happy. Quite happy indeed," and Lincoln was a little amazed at the younger boy's determination, misspeaking and faltering often on the words but determinedly working each of them out after a few tries, refusing to allow anyone to read something for him once he was sure he could do it himself.

Michael devoured everything around him, constantly bringing home books from the library three or four at a time and spending long afternoons curled up on the living room couch with Harold and the Purple Crayon, Make Way for Ducklings, Frog & Toad Are Friends. Lincoln watched him absorb everything he read, no matter what it was, his huge imagination spinning wildly with each new story. When Michael read Where the Wild Things Are he captured all of the sheets, pillows, and tablecloths in the apartment to construct a forest in his room, hoping to attract some friendly monsters. He sobbed uncontrollably after finishing The Tenth Good Thing About Barney even though they had never owned so much as a goldfish, let alone a cat, and Lincoln was sure he noticed Michael hugging his favorite stuffed animal extra hard after he read Corduroy followed by The Velveteen Rabbit.

For Michael's eighth birthday their mother bought him a complete set of The Chronicles of Narnia and Lincoln could swear his brother was just about ready to die with excitement. Michael nearly drooled over the seven brand new, crisp, fresh, and very grown up books for him to break into. They even came with their very own box and Michael adored them. It took him nearly two weeks to get through all seven, but Lincoln was sure that was faster than most other eight-year-olds would have finished them.

Three years and dozens of books later their mother was dead and the boys were alone. No family save an aunt who decided after two months that she was too young to have kids and sent them off to a foster home. Michael tried to be understanding about it, sadly agreeing with her that it'd probably be better for everyone. Lincoln bitterly packed their things together, followed their social worker out of their aunt's apartment, and never spoke to her again.

They moved three more times over the next several months and every time it came to packing Lincoln did his best to convince Michael to abandon the now worn set of books his mother had given to him. They were too big and bulky to keep lugging around, he argued, and what was the point anyway? They were just books, books Michael had already read, even, and he couldn't possibly understand why Michael still loved the magic and fantasy after he'd watched his mother's life trickle away.

But Michael refused to give them up, staring Lincoln down with a face full of intensity until Lincoln would inevitably cave, rolling his eyes and turning away with a muttered "Fine, whatever."

They dealt with their grief in different ways; Lincoln with anger, bitterness, and harsh words for anyone who tried to act as an authority figure, Michael with silence, worry, and a refusal to attach himself to anyone but his brother. Lincoln pulled away from everyone, still unable to ever sit still or relax, and spent many long nights out on his own when the enclosed space of whatever house they were currently living in began to feel insufferably claustrophobic.

And Michael continued to read, perhaps even more so than before his mother's death, taking shelter in his books and his imagination. When things were hard – bullies at school or at home, threats to once again send them away, run ins between Lincoln and the police – Lincoln usually took off in a burst for a while, leaving Michael to loose himself in The Neverending Story, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Black Stallion. He loved stories about ordinary people who were caught up in extraordinary adventures, and Lincoln wondered if Michael still believed that there were such things as magic in the real world.

Michael reread all seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia – twice – while Lincoln was in prison for the first time. The older brother came home after a month to aggravated foster parents who kept loosing track of Michael. He'd disappear for hours at a time and Lincoln would always find him buried deep within the bowels of one of the closets or cupboards, his back pushed against the wall, hands pressed flat next to him and his eyes closed. Lincoln would drag him out and ask what the hell he was doing, and Michael would mumble "nothing" and sulk off. But Lincoln knew that he was looking for a gateway to some world far away from their dingy neighborhood, where he could be a champion and a king, where cruel and hurtful people were always defeated. And when someone died it was gloriously, in the heat of noble battle or in effort to save another, not sick, lying pale and broken in a cold hospital bed.

They were shuttled off to a new foster home just after Lincoln's release and Michael stopped searching through closets.

Lincoln was happy to see Michael's taste begin to shift as he entered into adolescence. Fantasy stories no longer held his interest after a while, and he still spent far more of his time reading than Lincoln could really understand, but, Lincoln supposed, that's what it took for someone to be successful – read and study and take tests and fill your head with seemingly useless knowledge – and he knew his brother had the potential to be great. And at least he was filling his head with science and technology, reading things like Architecture: Form, Space, and Order, Physics for Scientists and Engineers, and The Art of Electronics, books that had much more possibility to be useful than books about monsters and magic.

Lincoln watched Michael sometimes, really watched him when he wasn't distracted by something else, and noticed the way Michael looked at the world, like he was seeing things with different eyes than everyone else. He could never really understand it, but when Michael started getting into his complicated books on engineering and physics and other things that Lincoln was hopeless to comprehend, he started spending long minutes looking up at the buildings and bridges around him with a look of serenity on his face.

They'd walk through the city and Lincoln would catch his brother lapsing into long silences while he stared up, as if he was seeing the buildings that had surrounded him his whole life for the first time. Lincoln would follow his eye line and see slabs on concrete and brick, bits of metal and wood, glass windows and nothing that seemed particularly interesting at all, especially to a twelve-year-old boy. But Michael stared at the tall buildings and long bridges as if he was seeing right past the bland concrete to something amazing underneath.

For Michael's thirteenth birthday Lincoln saved up some money and took him to a Cubs game, Michael's first time at Wrigley Field to see a game live and in person, and Lincoln was thrilled to see that his brother loved it.

They had to stop for several minutes before finding their seats so that Michael would stare, wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the deep green grass mowed into perfect crisscross rows, the ivy-covered walls encasing the field, and the thousands of green seats that formed a ring surrounding them both.

Michael watched the game while Lincoln watched Michael, trying to gauge his happiness and glad to see him more excited than he had been in a long time. The Cubs turned a perfectly-executed double play, the ball moving third-baseman to second-baseman to first-baseman, bam bam bam, and the crowd collectively jumped to their feet and screamed with delight. Lincoln grinned and clapped his hands and noticed as he sat back down that Michael never left his seat. Michael grabbed onto his sleeve and tugged, hitting his own knee with his other hand excitedly.

"Did you see that? That was…beautiful." He breathed the last word in reverence and Lincoln was a little mystified.

"Yeah, that, a, that was a good play, huh?"

"Yeah, but – but they did it perfectly, like a machine, they worked perfectly together."

Lincoln furrowed his brow, feeling once again like Michael was seeing something amazing that he was missing. But he nodded slowly and Michael turns back to the field, grinning.

An inning ended and the players trotted off the field while organ music piped cheerfully though the park. Michael watched the field, gazing at it adoringly, and it took Lincoln a few minutes to realize what he was looking at. He wasn't staring at the umpire dusting off home plate or the grounds-crew dragging the dirt of the infield. He was gazing at the ivy-covered brick way in the distance of the outfield with another one of those looks of serenity on his face, and Lincoln thought maybe this was magic to Michael. He didn't need dragons or hobbits or talking lions because he had beautiful structure and movement and composition, could see style and symbiosis in things Lincoln found painfully ordinary like ivy-covered walls and perfectly-executed double plays.

Years later Lincoln would come home – to Michael's home – after being released from prison with no apartment and only a few hundred dollars to his name. He let himself in with a spare key and paced around the crisp, clean space while waiting for his brother to come home from work. He couldn't find the TV remote, and the TV was useless without it, so he squashed that idea quickly and wandered over to the bookshelves lining one of the living room walls intending to just browse the selection. There was nothing he was interested in, all books on chemistry and structural engineering and physics and architecture and he couldn't care less about any of these books.

His eyes caught on something in the middle of one of the shelves, and he was surprised to see it, though he knew he really shouldn't be. There, nestled between The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary and World Architecture and Advanced Engineering Mathematics was a very worn copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Lincoln pulled the book off the shelf with a fleeting wonder of where the other six books were, and decided to page through it for a while until his brother got home. Only a couple hundred pages, he thought, and it'd been years since he'd read it – and then he remembered that he never actually read it at all, his mother had read it to him.

He sprawled out on the uncomfortably stiff couch and flipped the cover open, and then time seemed to stop. The hurried scrawl on the inside cover was almost unfamiliar, so much so that it felt like a punch hitting him when he saw it, but he recognized it immediately. He hadn't seen his mother's handwriting in years – decades, really, and his throat felt tight as his eyes moved across the words several times. He read them a dozen times, until he had them memorized, and he thought that maybe this was why Michael had held so tightly to his books for so long.

To Michael, on your 8th birthday –

Find magic wherever you can.

Love Mom

September, 1983