Ok, so we are back to insanely long chapters. I am honestly embarrassed by the length of this :) I didn't want to make it two chapters, as I think all sections contribute to the overall story of this chapter. Well, anyway. Here's to hoping I get better at editing soon.

Sindey - I know right ;)
Thanks for reading, everyone! Please leave me a word or two in the review box.

love, winter.

Sandcastles

Chapter Four

Of course he would show up early, Abigail Spencer sighed when she saw Michael Scofield standing at the reception desk in the Agency's lobby. The coat and tie he wore with perfect posture made him look like he was on a night out, not about to dig into grim files of death. But perhaps, she mused, it was his body armor, an assurance that he could keep the outside at bay. Her father was the same way, refusing to put on casual attire even in his downtime.

How her father would smirk if he was here, she thought. You will never make a good agent, he had wailed when he found out she had applied for the job. If you want to help people, volunteer. As soon as you are on a payroll, the collateral damage comes into play. At the time she had thought his own arrogance once again blinded him to the fact that she did know what came hand in hand with the badge. Her heart may have been beating all those years, but it hadn't made her significantly alive in her father's eyes or cares.

She shook her head to exile her father out of her mind where he had no place being.

In the elevator, they were joined by a woman and an invisible cloud of her indiscreet perfume. If Michael noticed how uncontrolled her glances in his direction were, he didn't show it. His eyes remained on his wristwatch, as if determined to count the seconds of the elevator ride. Given his reason for coming in today, Abigail wouldn't blame him if any banality was a welcomed distraction. She bit her lower lip and wondered again whether offering Michael Scofield, a man already tortured by his past, an opportunity to face his biggest demon, made her one of his tormentors.

The woman got off on the second floor. As soon as the door closed again and before Abigail could prudently check in the mirror whether her recurring doubt left a lipstick stain on her teeth, Michael inhaled so intermittently that he might as well scream out of the pain her precipitate decision had caused him.

"Why are you helping me?" he asked her, his voice barely above a whisper. She sought his eyes in the mirror, but they obstinately faced the floor.

Her father would lie. It was what he was best at, after all. Sometimes he wondered if he himself still knew what the truth was. She could lie, too – perhaps should. Michael wouldn't care, even if he saw through her words. But the reason he was here today was so personal, so heart-rending, she couldn't bring herself to lie.

"You know, I could never figure out why they gave me your case," she told him. "Scofield and Burrows. It's the biggest case of a decade, decades. Maybe there has never been a case of such magnitude. You'd think someone in the higher ranks would get it, as a thank you for your service before the retirement. And they give it to a complete rookie. I like to think they did so because the Agency is starting afresh, too. And I don't think a new start is possible when there are still unanswered questions."

She led him to a small room on the fifth floor. It was right at the end of the hallway, following half a dozen offices. The original plan had probably meant for it to be an office as well, but once the construction was finished, it ended up being a room barely big enough for a desk and a chair. They mostly used it for storage.

Michael didn't care for any of it. His attention was drawn to a brown file on the desk – or, rather, how devastatingly thin it was.

"When you said you found some files," he said, "I thought you were understating it."

"Yeah," she nodded. "I am still surprised how little there is on her, given her being a governor's daughter and all. But I guess after what happened to Bruce Bennett and with everyone focusing on the Company and Scylla …"

No one could spare time to look for her, Michael finished her words in his mind. And as the leader of the team, neither could he.

"Anyway, if you need anything …" she said, turning on her heels. She wanted to wish him good luck, just out of habit, but caught her words just in time. What kind of a monster would say something like that to a man about to search for the remains of the woman he loved?

"Actually, Agent Spencer," he stopped her just as she was about to step back in the hallway. Nothing about his light tone suggested that the following words were anything but carefully chosen, perhaps decided on before he had even walked into the building. "When you said that the case is still open, does this mean…"

"What do you need, Mr. Scofield?"

"Mahone's phone records and credit card statements," he said.

Her interview with Lincoln went on as usual, with the exception of his cursing her for giving his little brother access to files on Sara's abduction, and her sending him home after two hours. Perhaps this was why they had given her the case, she later mused. No one wanted to deal with Burrows' belligerent nature, and she definitely couldn't say she didn't blame them.

She checked on Michael's progress later in the day. Of course she had expected him to peruse those few pages in the file with unmatched diligence, but when she realized that one of the walls was now covered a map and another with paper clippings, she thought that Lincoln was right. What was she thinking, giving an already broken man a room and resources to deal a death blow to himself?

The map was of the part of the US stretching from New Mexico to Montana. Gila and the place where he and Lincoln had been held by the Company were circled. A line was drawn with a red pen between the two towns, and she guessed he had reconstructed Mahone's path with the help of the documents she had given him. It was only a map, of course, completely disproportionate, yet its size was enough for her to recall words Lincoln had once spoken.

Worse than looking for a needle in the haystack, he said. She had thought he was trying to protect his little brother in his typical hostile way. Now she realized he was speaking the truth.

She could be anywhere. And unless Michael could see something obscure to everyone else, none of the places along the line was more likely than the other. If the building the brothers had been taken to held any answers, they had long since turned into ash; it burned down the day after the two had escaped. If the video contained clues hidden by the unspeakable horror, they were never to be found now. Divers searched the river into which Michael had thrown the tape, but by then the currents had taken it for themselves.

She wiped the concerns off her face with a smile when he finally noticed her.

"Well, it's five o'clock," she said.

"So?" he said, his mind clearly still processing the contents of the file he was holding. Somehow he got his hands on a computer and a printer, putting them both on the desk. The printouts were on the chair, and for the first time in her life, she realized what it meant to feel claustrophobic.

"Nothing, just..." It was usually when she got off work, but what difference did time make to a man whose life had boiled down to one sole purpose? "I, um, I have something I need you to take a look at."

She handed him a book of the size she wished Sara's was as well.

"This contains all the Company's operatives, leaders, everyone we know that had ties to it. Those two men that held you and your brother. They may be in here."

There was nowhere to sit, so she slid down the closed door, facing the only wall not yet marred by the horror that had brought them together. She watched Michael as he flipped the pages, without having sat down. There were certainty and speed in the way his eyes moved from one picture to another, never lingering for more than a split second. He probably knew the features of the men he was looking for better than he knew his own.

"They are not in here," he said with harrowing blankness in his voice.

"Then we haven't put them in yet," she tried to sound encouraging, but the fucking walls were closing in on the truth. She hoped he would say something, anything, because all that was running through her mind was how sorry she was and that would be the final straw of her professionalism.

"I could never figure out why it was so easy to get away from them," Michael said. He, too, slid down the wall, the one with the map. He put the book down beside him with a thump she figured sounded a lot like the burden he carried. "They put us in the room that wasn't that high up. We could jump down without a problem. There were panels nailed to the window, but the nails weren't even fully in. I could just pull them out, you know. It was almost like they wanted us to get away."

"Actually, I'd say it makes perfect sense."

"How so?" he asked and tilted his head slightly to the right. She realized it was now adjacent to the circle marking Gila, as if symbolically showing that it was never far from his mind.

"You guys accused the President of having an incestuous relationship with her brother, on top of everything else. What better way to rebuff it than by apprehending you? If they just shot you dead in an alley, people may think they were really trying to hide something."

"I never thought about it like that," he said, and she realized he longed for another answer, the asinine one.

"Look, um. I know that you think of me as only an agent assigned to your case, but I just want you to know that if you ever want to talk to someone, you can talk to me. About anything."

"That sounds like you've missed your career path," he said.

"Sorry?"

"You should be a psychologist or something like that."

"Yeah, well. I was actually studying to be a child psychologist."

"What happened?"

"My father showed up. He was one of those child support dads. He chose his work and a woman over me and mom. I don't think he saw me a week's worth of days until I was 22. I had one semester left when… you know that rom-com trope when a guy shows up at the girl's window and it is raining? It was kind of like that. A changed man he was. He said he had been wrong, that he had just realized it was all a lie, and he wanted to make amends. Have a relationship with me. And, yeah. Out of spite, here I am. He hates that I'm an agent. He thinks it will ruin my life, just like it did his. But I want to prove to him that you can be a decent person and an agent. I want to help people, you know? Maybe I'm still an idealist for thinking that. Maybe I'm still waiting for my lesson."

"I'd say you are off to a good start," he said, tapping his fingers on the floor at each side of him. "She was to come to Panama with us."

"I know."

If her words surprised him, he didn't show it.

"We joked about our life there when I told her about the plan. How we'd have breakfast on the front deck, the sound of the ocean, fresh orange juice. That's why she went out before I woke. To get that and an ointment for a cut on my arm. I found the bag on the parking lot. She must have dropped it when…"

"It's a very silly thing, feeling guilty for falling asleep, Michael. Everyone should be able to go to a store without being abducted on the way."

"It would have never happened to her had it not been for me. Now the least I can do is find her."

Michael took his self-delegated obligation with seriousness that terrified both his brother and Agent Spencer. The only day he wasn't in the reception room before her (regardless of how early she left her apartment, he somehow got there first anyway) was the one day he didn't show up at all. He got on an early flight out of Dulles and landed in Chicago just before eight in the morning. It was the anniversary of Bruce Bennett's death and an annual memorial was being held. Michael was determined to attend it, just like he had the three previous ones.

Bruce Bennett died in his study less than four months after the most famous prison break in the history of Chicago. He was found slouched over in his chair by one of his assistants in the early morning. The autopsy ruled a massive heart attack as a cause of death and the subsequent investigation found no evidence of foul play. The venerable man had never made it to bed that evening and yet another bill on tax reform was the last thing he saw in life. After the murderous tentacles of the Company came to the surface and Governor Tancredi's suicide was reclassified as murder, a second autopsy was ordered, but its findings matched the initial ones. Whether it was stress, unhealthy lifestyle or simply his time, Bruce Bennett died of a heart attack.

Michael had gotten to know him a little bit before he passed. Bruce looked him and Lincoln up after that recorded conversation between then-President Reynolds and her brother was declared to be a hoax. They hadn't had long before she was taken in Gila, but Sara told him how much she trusted and appreciated Bruce. He believed her judgment with faith Lincoln frowned upon with oppressed words.

Bruce gave them a safe place to stay, money, and names of people that over time proved to be invaluable to their cause. He died before there were any tangible results of his actions, but Michael knew that without Bruce giving him and his brother a head start, the Company might finish them off first. By attending his memorials, Michael felt that he reaffirmed the role Bruce had played, a role whose importance perhaps only he truly still recognized.

There was a second reason, of course, a more willful one. In their scarce interactions, he saw so much of Sara in him that he had to shut his eyes to handle it. The same quiet strength, evident, yet never conspicuous or boastful. The unconditional will to understand; the kindness that shone particularly bright to those ignorant of how much they needed it.

The first time he had come to him, Bruce put his hand in Michael's knee and assured him that everything was going to be okay. The conviction in his voice was in such contrast with the desperation which pervaded him that he broke down after Bruce left. There was so much faith around him, so much hope for a better future, but he had seen his future, all his plans, bleed out in front of him. He couldn't let himself believe that anything would ever be okay again.

Brad Bellick picked him up at O'Hare. Who would've thought they would greet each other so cordially when Michael had entered Fox River all those years ago? When Bellick was more than just indirectly responsible for the loss of his toes and it was because of Michael that he spent a day in the hole dug up as part of the escape plan?

After Bellick was left for dead by T-Bag and had a short prison stint of his own, Agent Self suggested he join the group fighting the Company. It was an opportunity to clear his name and perhaps the closest he had ever gotten to a badge – or the mission it brings to its holder. After having worked together for over three years, Michael sent Bellick and Sucre home. They had reached the final, most dangerous stretch of their cause, and he was not to endanger any more lives. They of course fought his protestations, but eventually, Sucre returned to his family and Brad went back to Chicago. Now he had his own business working as a bounty hunter, prospering by all accounts, and for an umpteen time, he asked Michael if he wanted on the job.

"We'd be unstoppable," he assured him when the two embraced.

"Thanks," Michael said, "but I am planning on staying as far away from prisons as I can."

"Yeah, I can understand that," Bellick nodded, then lowered his voice, just as Michael had anticipated. "Any news about Sara?"

"No."

"I'm sorry, Michael. She was a good person. She didn't deserve this," Brad intoned, but he had spoken the same words a number of times and while he still meant it as much as the first time, their impact had been dwindled by the time ruthlessly passing by.

They went to the nearby diner, where Bellick offered to buy them absurdly expensive breakfast. He proceeded with a tale that saw him chase a double murderer across three states lines and resulted in a luxurious cruise for his mother.

After ten minutes, they were joined by Henry Pope. The former warden greeted them with a wide smile Michael used to think would never be directed at him again and still believed he didn't deserve. It had prompted Henry to pull him aside more than once in recent years and assure him that he harbored no hard feelings.

"What you did you did for family," he said. "God knows I failed mine too many times. I can't resent you for ending up in the middle of your plan. But it is a privilege to know that I played a part, however insignificant, in correcting the wrong."

Henry hadn't gone back to working in prison. Now he was a director of a halfway house. The pay was no match to his previous one, but he felt he could make a significant difference there than in prison. Freedom, he liked to say, was such a vague concept in prison, where surviving the day was in the foreground. Once the men were out, though, they were faced with what had put them behind bars in the first place. The idea of once again being unable to embrace the ones you loved whenever you wanted was what made most of the men he was responsible for eager to stay out.

Before Michael left for the ceremony, Pope invited him to a dinner at his house, like every time he was in Chicago, but they both knew Michael was not yet ready to accept the invitation.

The memorial was a simple affair taking place in a park in one of the poor neighborhood on the South Side. Its construction had been one of Bruce's first projects as a politician, and as the residents were proud to repeat every year, he had often returned. The first generation of kids he had met here was now grown up, with their own families, and he liked to spoil them, much to their continued gratitude and surprise. Michael mused that they had probably meant more to Bruce than they realized. Getting them a park had originally only been a project for him, an attempt to create a name for himself, to get backers of his political career. In time, they turned out to be more than a pool of voters he could count on; they were proof that he was on the right track, that his actions could directly improve people's lives.

Six rows of white chairs were placed by the magnificent oak Bruce had planted himself to mark the completion of the park decades ago. A small stage was decorated with paper lanterns that rustled in the wind and were of all colors of the rainbow. Two bunches of balloons were at each side of the stage, mimicking the lanterns' sway. Short speeches were made by leaders of the community and people who had been present when Bruce had first entered their neighborhood. Michael recognized them all by sight by now, though he doubted they remembered him. He never made an effort to introduce himself, to make himself any less of an intruder; every year he took the same seat in the back row, never always speaking to anyone.

Anyone from the community, that is.

Paul Kellerman showed up every year as well.

The first year, they didn't talk. They barely exchanged glances, the memories still too fresh to enable a conversation, no matter how scarce. By the time of the second memorial, Kellerman was pardoned for his role in the conspiracy, his confession being vital for its revelation. Somehow he got a job at the State Department, and the few words they exchanged pertained to the work they both did.

Today they could almost pass for old friends. Kellerman arrived late and out of breath.

"Sorry I'm late," he puffed, sitting down on the chair Michael had saved for him. "Just flew in. I, um, I met my daughter for dinner last night."

"I didn't know you had a daughter," Michael said as the kids' choir ascended the three steps to the stage, ready to start the ceremony.

"Yeah, well, I pretended for a long time that I didn't. I'm just getting to know her. As much as she lets me."

After the choir finished their last song and the balloons were given to the wind, the two decided to have lunch together. As the appetizers were brought, Michael realized why he didn't eschew Kellerman's presence, though he would have every reason to detest the man.

Anyone else he conversed with, the first thing they asked about was Sara. He knew that they did it out of care for him, noting the sway her fate held over him. Kellerman never alluded to her, much less brought up her name. Perhaps it was his narcissistic need to talk about himself constantly rather than an unspoken understanding the two had. Whatever the reason, the realization that he liked an occasion, however fleeting, to go by without her name spoken in someone else's voice perturbed Michael less than he would expect it to.

Incidentally, the one day Michael didn't show up at the Agency was the only day during their interviews that Lincoln arrived on time. it seemed like a contingency so unlikely that Abigail had let herself hit the snooze button just one more time, stop at her favorite pastry shop and read her life predictions on Buzzfeed during breakfast.

The lady at the reception desk knew Lincoln by now, and his anxious asking whether it was a habit of Agent Spencer's to be this late impelled her to send him directly to her office.

He knew why his brother wasn't coming, of course. The damn memorial, another link to the past he would be better off without. Sometimes Lincoln really did think his brother enjoyed being his own tormentor. The agent may think that going over the files and realizing there was nothing more he could have done would give him closure, but Lincoln was sure Michael would pervert it into just one more bludgeon.

At least he was making progress, though. Lincoln should probably be a little more proud of the fact that he finally decided to deal with his stress more constructively that blowing his money for cigarettes. He had been up most of the night, alternating between resisting the urge to go over to his brother's and beat some sense into him and longing for a smoke. He finally settled for counting down fucking minutes to the sunrise, and he probably broke more than one speed limit on his way here. Because as much as the fucking interviews pestered him, at least he couldn't smoke in the interrogation room.

The office was another matter altogether, clearly. There was an unopen pack in the pocket of his jeans, and regardless of where he was sitting, he could still see the fucking window.

He took out his wallet and counted the change he had finally acquired. He was on his second tasteless coffee when there was a knock on the door. An intern (who looked fucking older than Agent Spencer, Lincoln grumbly noticed) had a fax for the agent.

"Yeah, yeah, I'll give it to her," he said, fully intending on carrying out his promise. Because despite his reputation, he wasn't a liar. He did beat people up, yeah, but he never lied to them. However, after innocuously glancing at it, he threw the coffee (which was fucking tasteless anyway) into the trash and started going through the pack of cigarettes. He must have only had about a half left when the damn agent finally graced him with her arrival. She looked shocked to find him sitting on her desk which he moved in front of the open window, with a cigarette in one hand and a piece of paper in the other.

Yeah, he sneered when their eyes locked, probably he should have knocked first. He was just so fucking angry, for anger was the furthest thing from vulnerability, of course.

"They found Sara," he told her.

Her eyes widened (how the fuck was it possible for them to become even bigger, Lincoln wondered) and she snapped the paper from his hands.

It was a notification that there had just been a profile entered into the database of unidentified bodies and dishearteningly many of its parameters matched Sara. Gender, race, estimated age, approximations of weight, height. And then there was the location. Morenci, Arizona. Just across the border from Gila. It was her, it had to be her, his hand was shaking and the cigarette ash was falling all over the desk. Perhaps links to the past, he mused, were better than a full closure after all.

"It's not her," Agent Spencer said after probably less than five seconds of perusing the paper. To Lincoln, it felt like hours.

"What are you talking about?" he frowned. "It's a perfect match. Look at the fucking location."

"It's not her," she repeated. "Have you even read the report?"

"Of course I fucking read it!" he screamed and jumped off the desk. He wanted to thrash around and her fucking hair smelled like fucking strawberries. How dared she smell like spring when they were about to irrevocably shatter his little brother's shell of a heart? She should smell of death. He had no idea how she was to achieve that, but she should.

"A complete skeleton found, only the mandible and hands missing. You only take those away if you don't want identification, Lincoln," she spoke to him like he was five years old and seeing fractions for the first time, and he might as well be because he still had no clue how this could not be Sara. "And yet here we are, talking about this. Gender, height everything points to Sara. Come on, Lincoln. The Company wouldn't be this lazy, you know that."

"Then what would they do, huh?"

She sighed, and the good mood of the morning evaporated, a cornerstone of her dealings with Lincoln Burrows. She wondered if they had given her the case because they wanted her to quit, rather than just fire her.

"Lincoln, if I'm honest, I think there's less than 1% of ever finding her. I think they took her to taunt Michael, and eliminating a possibility of ever finding her just gives them an upper hand, forever, even after they are long gone."

Lincoln wanted to pick apart her statement and yell it back to her, just so that he could scream. He settled for another cigarette, hoping it would spoil the smell of the agent's stupid strawberry hair.

Morenci was a mining town at the edge of the Arizona desert. An oddly fitting place to find Sara, Lincoln thought, a town constructed with the aim to exploit, shamelessly uncover what was meant to stay buried, then celebrate by slaughtering some more.

Whatever the agent had assured him, Lincoln didn't discard the possibility of the body being Sara. It wasn't just that he hated that she was right about so many things. Sure, the Company may jubilate, knowing their enemy would never find what he searched for the most, but in Lincoln's mind, that required effort and care. The refusal to acknowledge that one is a human being, someone's child, someone's favorite person in the world, could inflict just as much suffering. Ditching the body in the first half-inhabited town you pass through, throwing just enough soil over it to hide it from casual glances, leaving what was left of a life so generous, so pure, to the consumption of bugs like it was a disposable item sold at every gas station, yeah, Lincoln thought it fit the Company's modus operandi swimmingly.

Agent Spencer had submitted Sara's DNA profile to Morenci's medical examiner, and today the results were coming in. Michael insisted they fly to Arizona and be told the outcome in person. Lincoln figured that if the woman was indeed Sara, he didn't want to be away from her for an additional moment.

The car ride from the nearest airport was disturbingly silent. For some reason, the desert wasn't as hot and dry as Lincoln had remembered from his early days on the run. Inevitably, of course, the arid land and lone cactuses standing in for road signs along the battered asphalt reminded him of the day Sara's disappearance remitted his flight to freedom.

He bowed down his head in embarrassment, remembering how self-absorbed he had been that day. His brother was barely keeping it together, and he stood idly by, cursing him for recklessly endangering them – for a chick, of all things. Would they still be here today, heading to Morenci, if he had quit thinking about his own ass that day? If he had done something more, anything but belittling a relationship that had become as important to his brother as their own, would they have found her in time?

He would never know. And it would forever abash him.

They spent hours in the rented car, its tires swallowing the miles to Morenci with a speed Lincoln didn't know whether to think of as too slow or too fast. No one talked and the radio wasn't on, even though Agent Spencer definitely looked like someone who knew the choruses of all Top 40 hits. She kept her eyes on the road, empty but for an occasional truck carrying copper. His brother, too, was staring at the road, but unlike hers, his eyes didn't welcome the passing vehicles. Lincoln doubted he even noticed them, his brother who never missed a thing. The only break in their routine came about an hour into their drive when Lincoln put his hand on Michael's shoulder, just to show him he was there for him. It was the only fucking thing he could think of, because words, nah, he sucked at words. But Michael didn't flinch, nor indicated he appreciated the gesture. Lincoln had never felt so desperate in his life, and he was a man who escaped a death in an electric chair by mere seconds.

Now they were seated in the office of the medical examiner. The AC was on, yet Lincoln still alternated between feeling cold and hot. It was an impossible situation, he realized. He couldn't decide whether it was a match that he hoped for. Sure, it would be over and his brother could finally start mourning. However, without having something to wake up for, no matter how deranged, Lincoln feared to ponder on alleyways grief would take his brother to.

It should make him pray for a negative result, but what good would that do to his brother? A continued obsession, more limbo no one had any idea how to break. A hope that he would someday have something even remotely resembling a normal life pared further down.

Agent Spencer had once told him that it would never end. He was starting to believe that there really was no Panama at the end of his road.

The room had no air, Lincoln finally decided and walked out, mumbling the same unintelligible excuse as the three previous times he could no longer sit still. Michael didn't seem to notice his brother leaving. With an expression so guarded Abigail would wholeheartedly admire if it wasn't so heartbreaking, he fumbled with the cuff of his shirt.

"You know, this is killing him just as much as it is killing you," she remarked casually, as if discussing a grocery list, when the door closed behind Lincoln. The only reaction Michael gave her was the movements of his fingers slightly slowing down, and she took it as an incentive to continue. "And you wanna know what I think?"

"Why do I have a feeling you will tell me regardless?" Michael said.

"I think that you know that none of this is your brother's fault. And you can't bear the fact that it isn't yours, either. That you did nothing wrong. So you've placed the blame on Lincoln; not because you'd consider him guilty or want him to think he was at fault. You feel like you deserve to hate yourself, so now you hate yourself for the unreasonable treatment you are giving Lincoln. Because of all the things one can hate themselves for, the hatred for their own family is the most profound one."

"Like you've told you once already, Agent Spencer, I think you have chosen the wrong career path," Michael said, with his eyes still on the cuff. He didn't lift them until the door swung open again, and Lincoln walked it, closely followed by the medical examiner, a stout middle-aged man with a smile whose width that made one wonder what had driven him toward such a morbid profession.

Samples were not a match, he told them.

Michael Scofield was a brilliant man. It occurred to Lincoln that he, too, must have realized the moment he had read the fax that this would be the most likely outcome. Yet his sigh upon hearing it confirmed was so ambivalent, imbued with relief and anguish at the same time, that Lincoln knew something stronger than cigarettes would be needed if he wanted to sleep that night.

Lincoln met his brother for breakfast the following morning. They were seated in the back of the diner, right by the window facing their hotel, and watching people exiting the hotel was a distraction Lincoln direly needed. Was it just in Arizona, or did people talk this loudly in all diners he had ever been to? His head felt too heavy to think. He could swear that if he closed his eyes, he could identify what every person in the diner had on their plate simply by the smell of it. And then there was the fucking music. Never before had he realized just how annoying the Latino music was, even with Sucre playing it at all of their get-togethers.

He watched Michael folding the paper napkin into a crane again, step by step, just like he had taught him when they were kids. He had asked Abigail (Agent Spencer, he corrected himself) what she thought about it the night before, when the bar was still open and there wasn't yet a need to embark on an odyssey to prolong the night. She thought it gave Michael a feeling of control and, as a result, peace, "something that has been taken away from him along with Sara." Lincoln didn't pretend to know or give any shit about psychology, but he had found the agent's explanation to be pretty neat, and now, when at least half of the alcohol must have already been out of his system, her words still made sense.

Michael didn't say anything when Lincoln forewent his usual morning order – eggs with bacon and toast, together with an insane amount of ketchup – and opted only for a cup of coffee. He remained silent when Lincoln's fingers tentatively reached for the cup, only to put it down again and again, even when the steam was no longer billowing. But Lincoln knew better. His little brother never missed anything, and when he added the dark circles under his eyes to the equation, the throbbing in his head increased because, fuck, it was so obvious.

But it didn't matter, his compartmentalization skill kicked in again. Her nails still drove him crazy (how was it possible that her nail polish was never chipped? He knew the amount of time he spent pondering that was borderline obsessive, but he just couldn't stop) and while she finally relented and started calling him by his first name around 11 o'clock, it didn't make her voice any less annoying. Nothing changed. What had happened was a completely, well, perhaps not a normal occurrence, but it was not the end of the world, either. His stomach felt like turning over because of the hangover and hangover alone. It was high time he admitted to himself that his roaring twenties were behind him, and after spending years either locked up or under supervision while working on the Scylla Project, he just couldn't drink as much as he used to anymore.

Everything was fine. Just peachy, he kept repeating to himself, even though the few glances his little brother cast at him made him wish for a sandy beach, just so that he could bury his head in the sand.

"So where's Agent Spencer?" Michael ineluctably asked where there were no steps left and the crane was done.

"Um, I don't know," he said, trying to minimalize his breathing because, fuck, whatever Michael ordered with his eggs, it fucking reeked. "I haven't seen her since, um…"

"Yesterday evening?" Michael innocuously proposed, and the blurry vision Lincoln was still experiencing made it simple for him to ignore the smirk on his little brother's face.

Lincoln nodded, grateful that it didn't require opening his mouth to form words.

"Linc, I need to thank you," Michael then intoned after a heavy sigh, pushing the plate with half-eaten eggs to his left and away from where Lincoln was sitting. Of course Michael had enough experience with his brother's hangovers and other questionable choices of the previous night to diagnose his behavior correctly.

Fuck.

"About what?" Lincoln shrugged, wondering if he would think of a possible reason sober. Because frankly, he couldn't recall the last time he had been a big brother Michael deserved to have.

"For coming here with me. And for telling Agent Spencer about the video."

"Nah, man, that's nothing. You don't need to thank me."

"But I do," Michael insisted, his look most certainly conveying more than Lincoln was in the state to decipher. He looked down, the sheer intensity in his little brother's eyes exacerbating the throbbing in his head.

"Hey, you botched the last step," he said, nodding towards the crane conspicuously placed between them.

"No, I didn't," Michael said with enough conviction for Lincoln to choose to believe him.

"The beak is too straight, man. I thought I taught you better than this. This is crap."

"Don't be ridiculous, Linc. I know how to make a crane," Michael insisted.

"Bullshit," Lincoln said and reached for a paper napkin. He might be horrible with words, but paper cranes transcended them; they always had. Michael did the same with playfulness in his nimble fingers which Lincoln didn't realize he had missed until it returned, after more than four years. "Now watch and learn. I'm only gonna show you once."

To Be Continued.

Broughttoyouby:::winter.