Sooooo I'm back with one more chapter, for those of you interested. Probably no more until later next week, as I have a big exam on Monday and obviously I am not studying as much as I should be :(

Thanks to the people who reviewed; I'm super happy you find this well-written! *hugs*

As always, forgive me any grammar faults; English isn't my first language so sometimes some blaring errors do escape me.

Anyway, back to the story. This chapter hopefully clears up what has happened four years ago. I'm planning on making this fic more relationship-focused than action- packed. And yes, events in the first chapter will eventually converge with the main narrative.

Hope you'll enjoy and do review if you find it at least remotely good ;)

love, winter

PS: some bad language, again.

Sandcastles

Chapter Three

Lincoln couldn't believe he was back here, at the Agency's headquarters, voluntarily, when the sun was already setting and it was hours after the interviews had ended for a day.

They hadn't gotten far. Michael was going over his plan for escaping Fox River and their subsequent run towards Panama (nitroglycerin was the chemical compound that had almost gotten him killed in the New Mexico desert, Lincoln realized. It even sounded malicious). There wasn't much Lincoln could add. After about an hour, he excused himself and escaped the smell of coffee, only to camp around a vending machine three doors down. Throwing coins (now he always had coins, he mused. While on the run and working with the government, his pockets were brimming with banknotes, brand new, their worth more than what he had ever owned before. Now wherever he went, there was the jingling in his pockets, making him feel like he again had nowhere to go and no idea what to have for dinner) into the coffee vending machine, he was blowing the steam off with the intensity he wished he could apply to his life as well.

He didn't need a fucking shrink (though Agent Spencer had mentioned one will be provided for him should he ask so) to tell him why he needed to be out of that room so badly. Michael had had a glamorous life before he sacrificed it all for him. A job that paid more than Lincoln could ever make on the right side of the law; an apartment that made him feel wickedly important merely for knowing someone who could afford it; a revered position in the most prestigious firm in Chicago, with a career trajectory going nowhere but up, so steeply it made his older brother dizzy with pride; his sprawling community work could almost eclipse Lincoln's extensive rap sheet.

All that was and may one day be Lincoln had taken away from Michael the day he walked into the parking garage with intent to take a man's life. He may not have pulled a trigger; he might not have done so even if Steadman's eyes were still lustrous with life as they faced each other, but did it matter? Did his innocence truly mean anything if his intentions were all but innocuous?

After he and Michael turned in the last Scylla card, he was exonerated. In no official records was he still referred to as a murderer, but countless people were listed as dead and their blood was indisputably, invisibly on his hands. It wasn't the agents sent to execute him that he lamented; his heart did shudder at the thought of the children, the families they had left behind, but they had chosen their careers. They had consciously picked up a gun each day, with no harness keeping them from killing, slaughtering. He and his brother, on the other hand, hadn't.

Lincoln had always been skilled at rationalizing his actions, in eliminating the emotional aspect whenever possible. All the men he killed with a direct action of his hands undoubtedly deserved it. Perhaps, he sometimes caught himself thinking, it was his arrogance convincing him so. Maybe if he thought of his killings as self-defense, there would be no need to admit that while proving his innocence, he turned into a ruthless killer.

The only merciful component of his actions was perhaps that his brother hadn't needed to pull the trigger. He failed Michael too many times to count and desolately believed he wasn't done disappointing him, but at least he saved his brother's soul from this particular burden. However, the truth they never spoke of was that Michael would have done it, had the right person faced the barrel of his gun. With Mahone having met his deserved end before their learning of his whereabouts and the other man vanishing into thin air, Michael had no one to kill but himself, over and over again.

Sometimes Lincoln wondered if it wasn't a blessing in disguise. His brother was no murderer (but he was no bank robber, a con, a burglar either, Lincoln grimly reminded himself). While revenging Sara's death – and everything else they had done to her – would bring him initial solace, the gain would be annihilated by the loss of himself he would face in the long term.

Michael and Agent Spencer walked out of the interrogation room before Lincoln could reenter it. There were still a couple of sips left in his third cup of tasteless slush when the door opening made him curse under breath. He hurried towards them.

"I was just about…" he started, beads of sweat again reigning on his forehead.

"Oh, no worries, Mr. Burrows," Agent Spencer beamed at him. His fingers fumbled with the coffee cup, and he waited for her to point out that the coffee she had offered actually had a flavor, not to mention was free. "You wouldn't be able to contribute much today, anyway."

Now that there was no one to beat up, no one's death to take on his shoulders, he truly was of no use to his brother anymore, Lincoln thought. He watched Michael pensively tightening the band of the wristwatch, something he did a lot when it was just the two of them. The truth was, there was nothing Lincoln could undertake instead of his brother to make up for the biggest loss he had caused him, and they both knew it.

Fucking propriety.

Now he was back here, white stairs under his feet feeling like smoldering lava and the setting sun reminding him of the tropics. There was absolutely no need for him to be doing this, he repeated to himself, for what must be the hundredth time. He had said no to Michael's invitation to lunch, opting for walking along the Potomac River, as if it could offer him nepenthe or at least a solution. It took him two packs of cigarettes (and now back to smoking as well, he sighed. He was resorting to his pre-Fox River ways with a speed of sound) to gather enough courage to wait for Agent Spencer.

He snorted when he realized how alike this was to his first date with Veronica. He was thirteen, waiting for her in front of the library (in hindsight, it was glaringly obvious how too good she was for him), and his slippery palms were an embarrassment that brought about another round of sweat. He longed for a cigarette then, too, but was determined to at least try to look presentable (the palms, he decided, were out of his control). Bad breath must be a turn-off, he figured.

Veronica had died for his freedom, for her unwavering faith in him. If she had avoided that bullet, she would be ashamed of what he had turned into, he thought. He was failing her, just as he was failing Michael. The least he could do was tell the agent what she needed to hear to close their fucking case, yet would never, ever get out of his brother.

If Agent Spencer was surprised to see him, she didn't let it manifest on her face. Clutching a light purple folder to her chest (even the colors she apparently liked he found annoying), she paused on top of the stairs before descending towards him. It gave him enough time to extinguish a cigarette and throw it into a bin. If there was something improved in comparison with the days before the nightmare started, he at least wasn't littering anymore.

"Mr. Burrows," she greeted him. "Back for the coffee from the vending machine?"

"Look, there's some things I need to tell you," he said with an urgency that made him wish the cigarette was still between his lips. "For your write up or whatever you are doing. I don't want any recording or some shit like that in my face, ok? And I'll say it only once."

"Well, I guess the work you have done these past four years does grant you a right to be a bit picky," Agent Spencer laughed. She offered him a talk in the park, but he opted for her car. Ironically, a body in a car had set the whole ordeal in motion, yet in the years since, Lincoln started seeing cars as a haven. Sure, there had been car chases and car crashes; he had been handcuffed in more than one police vehicle and the suffocating silence had been the third passenger in more cars than he could remember, but with car keys in his hand, Lincoln could always get away. The hope the car represented to him outweighed the struggles it had imposed on him.

"So, I presume you want to talk about Miss Tancredi?" Agent Spencer went straight to the point once the car doors were shut. The mention of the name he still couldn't say out loud, even after four fucking years, made him reach for the cigarettes in the pocket of his jeans. After all, the shit he had shouldered before Fox River had nothing on the cesspool he was drowning in now.

"You mind?" he said, his fingers suddenly fumbling with the lighter.

"I would prefer if you didn't," she told him, then nevertheless leaned toward the window on his side. As she did so, a smell of something he could only characterize as pink (pink as her nails. What agent has pink nails, Lincoln snorted) invaded his nostrils. "But, if you absolutely must, open the window."

"Thanks," he said, inhaling deeply. "And, yeah, you're right. It's about… her. Have you and Michael…"

"No, we are still talking about his plan."

"Yeah. Look, he, um… there are something things you won't get out of him. And, um, I just want this to be over. So I guess I have to be the one to tell you."

"I would appreciate that."

"Yeah. So you know they met up in Gila, right?"

"And she was kidnapped there, yes."

"We were supposed to fly out to Panama that day. I was waiting for him, but he didn't show up in time. Only later did he tell me about her. Apparently, he had arranged for her to come with us, I don't know. I lost my shit, man. And he was out of his mind, just driving around, searching, all fucking day. I told him what if she just changed her mind, you know? I was sure her father had her picked up. Michael wouldn't hear about it. That was before I knew about… He kept repeating that they had her. We had the FBI, The Company, Bellick, god knows whom else on our trail and he was just… God knows how long we'd be in that fucking town if it wasn't for…"

"What happened?" she said after he had taken one puff too many to hide his stalling.

"Our dad showed up."

"Aldo? There's no note of that in your files."

"Yeah. You'll see why. Anyway, he said doc's father had evidence that could exonerate me. And then Michael just pulled out this key. He said she had found it on her father's body – that was the first I heard about him dying – and somehow my brother got it. I guess she gave it to him, I don't know. I never asked what they were up to in Gila. But he was sure it was it. Then Mahone showed up. Dad got shot and he, um. We buried him there. I think Michael told you we want him reburied in Chicago? Then we got picked up by Mahone and it was Kellerman that got us out."

"Yes, I am familiar with that part of the narrative," Agent Spencer said. "Then you went to Montana, right?"

Perhaps she studied our file after all, Lincoln thought.

"Eventually, yeah. Kellerman was our inside man. He told us Steadman was still alive. We discovered that the key opened a locker in this club in Chicago. So we went there and found a USB key. It was a recorded conversation between President Reynolds and her brother after he supposedly died. You must have heard it. We drove to Montana to take pictures of him to, um, you know. Have more proof. And after that, all hell broke loose."

"Mr. Steadman committed suicide."

"That wasn't it. That was after we already had all the evidence we needed. Michael, um, he wanted to give the tape to the Company, in exchange for her. Kellerman said that he was a fool if he thought that the Company would play fair, regardless of the stakes. I agreed. More because I just wanted to release the tapes and have it all over with than because I thought his words had any merit. Then that motherfucker put a gun in his mouth and everything was just red. We cleaned it up, and when Michael was out of earshot, Kellerman said that we needed to get those tapes out on TV if any of us wanted to be free ever again. And I said yes. I knew Michael would never let him do it, not when they had her, so, um… we did it behind his back. And we didn't tell him about it. He didn't know until it was all over the news."

"I imagine he must have been very upset."

"Not in a way you'd imagine. He didn't yell or hit me or stormed off or anything. He just…. Looked at me, stared for what felt like ages. It wasn't anger, or sadness. Just… disappointment. That after everything I dared to betray him like that. I knew where he was coming from, of course, but I was just so sure it was the right thing to do."

He remembered dozens of excuses that ran through his mind as he stared back at his brother, basking in his judiciousness. Think of LJ, he wanted to shout. He lost his mother, for fuck's sake! These tapes could make sure he doesn't lose his father and uncle as well, that he could have a normal life! That we could all be free. And once the Company's deeds are exposed, they will certainly release the doc, just to avoid one charge hanging over their heads. She would be of no more value to them. She's a daughter of a fucking governor! Everyone in America will want her free. This will end everything!

He had said none of these things out loud. Perhaps, he wondered now, it had been as early as then that he stopped believing a single one of them. Maybe it was his mind just playing tricks with him, making him believe it could all end with a couple of fucking tapes. After years of seemingly irrefutable accusations, after countless appeals to allegedly objective bodies, that something as simple as a recorded conversation could end it all. Considering the reality of his situation, the inescapability of the fate forced upon him, who could blame him for wanting a respite, no matter how silly? In hindsight, he had been fucking insane.

Michael remained silent when their tape just … disappeared. The Company made sure any talk of it ceased with the first broadcast. A day later, a leading newspaper published an expert's opinion that the tape was forged, and America forgot all about the scandalous allegations after an emotional speech their president made. She fondly remembered her brother, how he had nursed injured birds back to health and how the two of them had once forgotten about milk boiling and spent their summer working around the neighborhood to pay for a new stove. If anyone still happened to consider the tape as possible truth, their thoughts were derailed when Boston was hit by a terrorist attack. A bomb in a mall that claimed almost a hundred lives rendered the blabber of two escaped convicts irrelevant; the subsequent hunt for the terrorist pushed them into the obscurity they hadn't emerged from for four years.

No call came to give them doc's whereabouts. She wasn't dropped off in front of their motel. Two days later, Kellerman left to get some food and never returned, apparently opting to fight his former employee on his own. The following day, Michael told him they had to leave for Panama. Lincoln didn't ask about the plan, nor did he offer an apology for having leaked the tapes behind his back. In his mind, he had done the right thing. The futile outcome didn't make it any less right, he kept telling himself. Back then, he actually believed it.

They were on the road for less than a day when a black SUV drove in front of their car, forcing Lincoln to stop. Before he could put in reverse, two men dressed in black, with black masks as a carapace of their faces, got out and pulled the two brothers out of their car. Cloths they put on their mouths were soaked in something that made them pass out, and when they came around an indefinite amount of time later, they were seated in a small room, with hands tied behind their backs. Michael had woken before him, watching as Lincoln drowsily took in his environment.

"Where the fuck are we?" Lincoln said, his voice once again unrecognizable to him.

"I don't know," Michael said. "There must be a million rooms with their shutters closed in America."

If there was ever an inappropriate time for his brother's sarcasm, it was then, but Lincoln realized he was in no position to argue. He let his eyes adjust to the dark, but he still couldn't make out a fucking thing. He was sure Michael had no such issues. He had probably discerned fucking nails keeping shutters in place. It wasn't risible to think he had already thought of a way out. Before Lincoln could let himself ask, a door somewhere behind their backs opened and a man appeared in front of them.

They were so good at messing up the Company's plans, he told them, the Company wanted them to do something for them. There were cards with a name Lincoln had never heard before and they needed them. Considering Scofield's talent at breaking out, he must know a thing or twenty about breaking in as well.

"No," Michael was stern. He had been repeating it for fifteen minutes before the first threat aimed at LJ came. Lincoln cursed and would vehemently scream yes if he was held with anyone but his brother. His brother was a fucking genius, after all. He must have thought of a way out.

The sternness somewhat diminished, but it wasn't what the man was after.

"Then I guess I'll have to show to the two of you why it is better to work with us rather than against us," he said, exiting the room.

Lincoln was left pondering what exactly the man meant. Somehow he could never make a connection when the prison doc was in the equation. He wondered sometimes whether that made him a brutal or a broken man.

It was Michael's face that made him realize what was likely to follow; the way his body convulsed, trying to find a way to untie the rope cutting into his wrist, the sheer horror on his face that had been so expressionless these days.

When the man returned, he was pushing a gurney with a TV on it in front of him. He wasn't alone. The man following him brought two large, and as it turned out, extremely powerful lights. He placed one to the left of the two brothers and the other to their right. Then he was out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

The first man squatted in front of them. If he was blind to the details of the room, his face Lincoln could see perfectly. In the following years, he pictured him in his recollections plenty of times without forgetting a single feature.

"I'm gonna ask you one more time. Are you sure you don't want to work for us?"

This time it was Lincoln that said yes.

"Just remember, I didn't force this on you," the man said, then got up and turned on the two lights. Lincoln could swear he had never seen anything as bright. Only by looking forward, to the television, could he avoid the pain throbbing in his head.

Then the video started.

"What was on the video, Lincoln?" the agent gently asked him after he gave in to silence for a minute. He lit another cigarette.

"I'm only gonna tell you this once," he said, the hoarseness of his voice bringing back more memories of those horrible days. "I'm already seeing it all the time, there's no way I'm ever saying it again. She, um, she was tied up. Naked. Hanged by her hands like a pig to slaughter. It was dark, but it was clear what it was, you know? That it was her? You couldn't miss that hair anywhere. There were two men. Mahone and, um, another one. He never showed his face to the camera. That's why Michael never found out who he was. Anyway, they were, you know. I couldn't watch it, man. I turned my head, but those fucking lights were everywhere. I shut my eyes, but you could still fucking hear. But Michael, he … Fuck. He just stared at the screen, Throughout. I don't think he even blinked. Just stared. No words. Nothing. And they were talking to him. You know, about… her. That's probably why they took her. To taunt him. It just seemed to go on and on. And then, um, Mahone grabbed a knife and, yeah."

"I'm so sorry, Lincoln," the agent said, but he didn't acknowledge her.

"Once it was over, the man took out the tape, turned off the lights and left the room. He wasn't gone for a minute when Michael somehow knocked over a light. It broke and he used a shard to cut the rope. I wanted to say something, but what the fuck can you say? It was crazy. He… he said we were getting out of there. That was the only thing he said and he was just so…. Calm. Fucking calm. I don't know. He must have been out of it, you know? He untied me and went to the window. I don't even know how he opened it. And we were out. We stole the first car we saw, then parked in an alley and just… waited. I thought he had arranged for someone to pick us up. He didn't say a thing. But at night, he, um. He went back to where we were held. Broke in to get the tape. Destroyed it. Threw it into the river so that no one would ever find it."

"Can't say I blame him for it."

"Then we were headed back south. But something was off. He never said anything – I swear he never talked –, but somehow I figured we weren't going to Panama anymore. And then we were picked up again, by Agent Self. He said he worked with our dad and had a handwritten note to prove it. He said that in exchange for bringing down the Company, finding Scylla, we would be exonerated. And we agreed. But that is in your files, Agent Spencer."

"Thank you for telling me," the agent said.

"I'm not proud of leaking those tapes, you know," words left him before he could stop them. Perhaps LJ had been right in claiming it would do him good to say this stuff out loud. But LJ had also become infatuated with an idea of doing voluntary work in India recently, after having spent time with his uncle, and his uncle didn't appear to be doing any better. "I'm not a monster. But I just wanted it to be over. I had my son to think of. They killed his mother and I was all he had left. I really thought that by releasing that video to the public, it would all be over. I would be exonerated, whatever, and LJ could come live with me and have a normal life. If I had known they'd just bury it and do what they had…"

"It was an impossible situation, Mr. Burrows. There was no right or wrong decision to be made. Any decision could lead to a perfect resolution or a cataclysm. You did what you genuinely thought was best, with the best of intentions."

"Maybe, but I still made it behind his back."

"You did it for your son. His nephew. I'm sure your brother understands that. He's a compassionate man."

"I just wish he… it's been four years. Yet he acts like it happened yesterday. I'm not saying he should forget or anything, because I fucking can't and I didn't even… It's killing him, you know. It's gonna kill him. And I can't just watch it happen. He's my brother."

"Condoning his way of grieving is not the same as being there for him, Mr. Burrows. I am sure your brother does not like you smoking, but lets it be," Agent Spencer told him, just as he was about to reach for another cigarette. "Do you ever think of the consequences of your brother's plan? It wasn't just Sara that lost her life. Mr. Hudson. Mr. Westmoreland. Mr. Tweener. Mr. Geary. Everyone Mr. Bagwell killed while out. That's a lot of deaths for any person to make peace with. And I've read in Mr. Scofield's psych evaluation that he is prone to emotional identification with various subjects."

"What the fuck does that mean?"

"I don't know. I told you, I read it in his file. What I'm saying is that while your brother was certainly aware that his plan to break you out could potentially end in a loss of life, he likely didn't predict he could have a hand in deaths of so many individuals. And for someone with the psychological traits that he possesses, dealing with the aftermath is probably more arduous than it would be for you, for instance."

"Are you saying I'm heartless?"

"No. Just that you deal with loss in a different way. From what I understand, you suffered a loss very similar to your brother's."

"That's different. Me and Veronica knew each other since we were kids," his defensive tone surprised him.

"The amount of time you spend with someone does not dictate your feelings toward them, Mr. Burrows," Agent Spencer said, turning in her seat to face him. "Have you ever considered that his grief is not only directed at Sara? That in a way Sara has come to represent all the lives lost in the last four years? Because dealing with each death individually would prove too emotionally demanding for him? So he's transferred all his grief on one person only, Miss Tancredi."

"If you're implying this is why my brother cares for Sara, you are an idiot," he told her, and the indignation at this woman (whose nails were pink and who so gallingly referred to everyone as a Mr. or a Miss, as if they were in a fucking school or something) merely insinuating that his brother felt anything but love for the prison doc made him completely overlook her name escaping his lips.

"All I'm saying is that you shouldn't let the Company win, Mr. Burrows."

"They're all in prison or dead. Krantz is awaiting execution," Lincoln stated what he found to be obvious. "It's over."

The agent shook her head.

"That's not the win I have in mind. Don't let the consequences of their actions – or yours – drift you and your brother apart, You've been through too much to lose each other now when you most need one another. Because you may think it is over, Mr. Burrows, but what you have survived, it won't ever end."

He met his little brother for breakfast the following morning.

The words Agent Spencer had spoken riled his mind throughout the night. It must be the lack of sleep still making him just think about it, he figured.

"Michael, are we okay?" he nevertheless asked.

Michael's eyes shoot up neither in surprise nor reassurance. He stayed focused on folding a crane out of the paper napkin, just like he had been doing since his big brother taught him how.

"You're my brother. Of course we are okay," he finally said, his voice indicating his thoughts were dedicated to the perfection of the origami. But Lincoln knew his fingers worked in reflex by now and that the words were carefully pondered on and chosen.

"God damn it, Michael. I don't want us to be okay just because we're fucking brothers."

If there was a response Michael decided on, it was rendered unnecessary when the TV above their hands announced there had been a plane crash somewhere in Europe that resulted in a major loss of life. As helicopter footage showed the smoldering wreckage of what used to be such a magnificent feat of engineering, Lincoln could swear it was shaped just like the fucking origami his brother was working on.

To Be Continued.

Broughttoyouby:::winter.