Dear all,

I wish I had a better apology for the past two months than the good ol' "life just got the better of me" one. But thanks to those of you still sticking around :)

As you may remember, once upon a time I spoke about the previous chapter being cut short. Well, this is the rest of it, haha :) as you may notice from its structure. I guess nothing that spectacular happens in this one, just a few snapshots of the Scofields ... but it was important for me to write these, as they bring the story the full circle. That said, I hope you like it :)

Now the good news - I have already finished the short epilogue. I'll be posting it on Friday, since I'm celebrating my birthday then and I think it would be a fitting day to conclude the story. Like a little gift for me and for all of you who have been following the story from the start :) honestly, I still can't comprehend how long this ended up being :O

Anyway. I hope you are well and that you will like this.

I know I have been horrible these past two months, but please review? :)

More on Friday.

Love, winter.

PS: I think I made up a couple of things in this chapter. If they go against canon, so sorry. Also, maybe some things have been mentioned in previous chapters? I have been too lazy to go back and read them.

Sandcastles/The Bars Between Us

Part Three – Forward

Final Chapter – Part Two

Sara never knew whether Michael was a cat or a dog person. In late October, she realized that Michael himself had no idea. Growing up, he had never been in one home long enough – or at least not in a home caring enough – to have a pet, and afterward, when he had a job and a place of a redundant size, he was too used to being alone to think of getting a pet. And of course, after he lost most of what he had and all of what could be, solitude was the one solace and the deserved tormenter.

Thus when their son hesitatingly asked if he could maybe get a pet, Michael was just a thrilled by the prospect. If Bryce had a specific pet in mind, his dad had no preference. So on one of those autumn afternoons when the leaves still adorned the world with warmth before sticking together in a slippery sheen on sidewalks, the three of them headed to the nearest animal shelter (Sara might insist that their son was barely like her, but the more time he spent with him, the clearer it was to Michael that the boy might see the world in a way that matched his father's, but he interpreted it and acted upon it with warmth and compassion matched only by his mother).

"The kittens are this way," the lady at the counter pointed to the right after Bryce had informed her that they were there to adopt a cat.

"No, I don't want a kitten," he clarified. "I want a cat no one else wants."

In the end, he chose a cat that was black without a blemish and missing his left eye. He named him Toulouse, after his favorite city in France, and they were inseparable from the moment the door of the cage opened and Toulouse made a tentative step forward, then another, his widened eye assessing Bryce's parents. He proceeded to meow quietly and, balancing himself on his hind legs, place his paws on the boy's shoulders, unwilling to leave his arms for the entire drive home.

A bed for Toulouse was put in the laundry room, yet somehow every night the door of Bryce's room was left slightly ajar. Under the stealth of the dark, four little paws jumped on the boy's bed and slept the night away curled in a ball by his legs.

The parents knew, of course, but didn't mind.

"Does this make us terrible parents?" Michael asked one night, too late a night for two working parents and too young a one for two lovers reunited after so long.

"Probably," Sara laughed in response.

Halloween was the first real holiday they would celebrate together as a family. Of course Bryce had heard people referring to his father as Superman but he never concurred with them more than when dad brought home two of the largest pumpkins the boy had ever seen. Regardless of his effort, he could do little more than watch in awe as dad picked up the knife – the big one, the one he didn't even like mom handling – and carved a two-teethed grin so skillfully no one would believe it was his first time doing it. In all honesty, this was all as new to him as it was to his son.

Of course Michael had celebrated holidays before. When they were kids, Lincoln hadn't exactly planned his juvie stays around the holidays, but the ones he was out, he got a turkey or a cake somehow, a tree of a respectable size and a box of baubles (Michael had a pretty good idea why they were all in different colors), even a couple of presents (though truthfully, Michael would prefer to get no present at all, since they meant Linc risking juvie, again). Later, both of them had tried for LJ. Even though all essential elements of a celebration in style were on every photograph LJ took, they all knew there were too many people absent from the table for the holiday spirit to truly descend upon them.

But now, as Toulouse jumped on the table, sniffed the orange pumpkins that had taken the spotlight usually reserved for him and climbed into one of them for his afternoon nap, Michael realized that for the first time, he had every reason for and no excuse against celebrating every holiday the calendar had to offer.

What Michael didn't know about Sara was that she was allergic to walnuts, and when he found out, he of course couldn't help but reprimand himself for not knowing.

"Well now you are just being ridiculous," she laughed after he had apologized for the third time for almost ordering them a walnut cake for dessert. She squeezed his fingers between hers and laid her head on his shoulder, eliciting the self-deprecating sigh that would once annoy her. Now she kissed the skin just above the collar of his shirt and couldn't decide whether she was just finally carefree or simply in love. When he rested his chin on the crown of her head, she realized that she was both. It walked hand in hand, being in love and free.

Later they took a ride on the ferry. They were on the deck, braving the chill as the lights of New York passed them by. Sara tried to keep her hair sprawling down her left shoulder, but the wind kept ruffling it. The more she told him to quit laughing, the more Michael found it impossible not to laugh. It was probably what gave him the courage to ask what had been on his mind for longer than he would admit.

"Why did you keep him? You had no reason to hope I would ever be here to raise him with you."

Not too long ago, in fear of being misunderstood even though his air left no room for doubt in anyone's eyes, he would attest how happy he was that she had. Now he knew that there was no need.

Sara only shrugged.

"He was our baby. You and me, we made a baby, against all odds."

She remembered the days in Costa Rica, how the initial relief and anticipation had been tainted with a suspicion that gradually turned into horror unimaginable, let alone utterable. She ascribed the weight of her limbs to it, nausea that convulsed her body, restlessness that didn't grant her sleep. She should have known better, being a doctor and all, but by the time it occurred to her, she hadn't been alone for nearly three months. She had started volunteering at a local clinic and one morning (she had stopped counting the mornings when she couldn't keep anything down), a girl no older than seventeen walked in. Pregnant. Sara knew right away, but the girl wouldn't hear of it, so she enumerated the signs to her. At first she smirked, so many matching her own symptoms, but after she finished, the chaos of her life subsided and the world became louder than ever.

"It made you happy," Michael now said after she told him. It wasn't a conjecture.

"Immensely."

"Why didn't you find someone? It would be easier, not doing it all by yourself."

"I thought about it for a while, after Bryce was born. But I was never alone. And, you know," she hid her smile in a sigh. "Then there was that other thing."

"What other thing?" he asked, as though it had ever been any different with him.

"Loving you."

He kissed her forehead, like he had a habit of doing these days, so often without a reason or regard for who may see it. They didn't have to hide anymore.

"Then, when you saw me on the news … Did you think I left you?"

"For a while, yes," she admitted. He tried not to show the hurt her words inflicted, though he'd be the loudest to claim he deserved it. She knew him too well not to see how he clenched his teeth. She cupped his face, caressing it to ease the tension. "Oh, come on. Like you didn't when they told you I had been alive all those years."

The remark went disregarded.

"And you went to the embassy. You thought you were still wanted for jumping bail, and yet you went there. They could have arrested you and taken Bryce from you."

He was being nice about it: they absolutely would have taken Bryce from her if she had still been a wanted fugitive.

"Yeah, but I knew you'd take care of our boy if I couldn't," she said, because no matter how carefully he had put up a veneer, for her and everyone else, somehow she had always seen him for who he really was.

After they got home, their cheeks reddened by the cold and their hands far from being tired of holding the other, they led each other to the bedroom and took off their clothes. There was one condom left, but it tore when the wrapping was opened. He cursed under his breath, but it didn't matter, really. It had not mattered for a while now; they just hadn't put it in words yet.

"Don't worry about it," she told him, then laughed at his shocked face. "I thought you said you wanted more kids."

"Of course I do, it's just… Are you sure?"

In a moment of another kind, she would wonder what there was to be sure about now when they were together.

"I'm not 29 anymore."

"You don't look your age any more now than you did then," he quickly assured her, like she knew he would.

"So we're making a baby, then?" she gave him a smile he could resist no better than the sound of another set of tiny feet running toward their bedroom on a lazy Sunday morning.

Sara didn't know that Michael had made sure that the rent for her apartment in Chicago was paid, even during the years when there had been no incentive to hope she would ever again be anything more than a name on a lease.

She found out one evening when the four of them – Toulouse was of course considered to be a member of the Scofield household – were having Indian take out. Bryce decided he talked enough about his day in school and asked mom to tell about her trip to India. As she talked about the people she had met, the places she had visited, she remembered the silly little things she brought home with her that later served as those few personal touches she allowed herself to have in her former apartment.

"I wonder what happened with it all," she sighed in remembrance, and something about Michael's expression told her he knew all too well.

Later, when their son wandered around the land of dreams as pleasant as their reality and Toulouse was ensconced by his legs, they made their way to the balcony. It was one of those rare clement nights of late autumn, so they didn't need anything but each other's arms.

"Why did you do it if you thought I was never coming back?" she asked him.

He must have been expecting the question, for his hand, loosening the knots in her hair, didn't stall.

"Because I couldn't have them pack your life in boxes and action it off or throw it in the trash. And I couldn't do it myself either," he said with candor unimaginable just a couple of months ago.

A few days after the first snowflakes of the winter stuck on the pavements and just before the first lights of the season adorned the streets, the two of them flew to Chicago. She kept the scarf wrapped tightly around her neck to fight off the cold and the doubt, but the closer they got the apartment building she had once called home, the more she felt herself shiver. It didn't escape him, of course, and he wasn't foolish enough to believe the temperature was the main culprit.

"We don't need to do this," he said.

They didn't. They were meeting Brad and his wife for lunch, Katie for the afternoon coffee, and Michael had finally accepted Henry's invitation to dinner. Since this was their first getaway, it surely wouldn't hurt them to have as much time for themselves as they could.

"No, I'm fine," she insisted, but they both knew it was her favorite word of platitude. They walked past the corner shop where she used to buy frozen dinners after a long day at Fox River. The cracks in the gray asphalt they stepped over like she had when she had been innocent enough to believe in superstition. Then they waited at the traffic light that gave them permission to cross the road way, way quicker than she remembered from back in the day.

Once they stood in front of the building that had been her home before she learned the true meaning of the word, she stalled by reading the names of the residents. It was still there, right at the bottom of the list, the tag on which she had handwritten Tancredi. The ink had not fared well against the weather and the lettering was barely intelligible, fading over time just like she had from everyone's mind but his.

"Have you been here before?" she asked him as they climbed the stairs.

"No."

He might have never set foot inside the building, but they had been here once, in promise. You should see my apartment, she joked the day after he had given her the first flower. The infirmary could be any of the hundreds in the city and he was only a man and she only a doctor not warned on her first day on the job not to fall in love with someone like him. However, he was never a prisoner, not really. She might be a terrible judge of character but she was right when it mattered the most.

Michael unlocked the door. Neither spoke as the door, creaking after years of disuse, slowly opened. The air inside had been left undisturbed for a better part of a decade, but they would be lying if they claimed that was what kept them from walking in.

"Is this where it happened?" he later asked quietly, standing by the couch, as if he knew already. He probably did, she guessed, knowing just enough of his years without her for his frantic loyalty to break her heart every time she thought of it.

When she put his conjecture into words he braced himself against the couch, as though he had been carrying both of their weights of the day that almost ended what they had barely started. If she was candid, she didn't bring the night of her overdose to the fore of her thoughts nearly as often as he did.

"Hey, it wasn't your fault," she told him, laying her hand on his back and for once, she didn't feel him relax against her touch.

"Don't give me the NA lines, please," he said brusquely, something she figured he would apologize for later. "Did you try to…"

She hurried to deny it but was too quick for either of them to fall for it.

"I don't know," she then admitted.

Time was supposed to arm you with clarity, but that day, it was much more than what those simple labels called it – his escape, her overdose. There was the conversation with her father (Liar. Thief), the kiss and the wrongfulness of it, the keys and the betrayal of his, her inability to do anything but everything for him, the breaking of a code she had so staunchly stood behind until he appeared. All she wanted was for all of it to come to a still. She didn't want any of it so much that she forgot to think of anything else she might want.

"I miscalculated. I hadn't used in so long that the dose I used to handle just fine was too much for me," she said. She didn't know how any of her words were supposed to soothe him, but perhaps loving someone didn't mean shielding them from the pain, even when it entailed lying. Facing it all together, offering a hand and a shoulder rather than enforcing patronization, that was the kind of love she wanted, thus should give.

So when he asked her how close it was, even though she could feel his heart rip open with every syllable that left her lips, she said, "Too close."

"I should have found another way," he sighed, but after years of perusing that fateful night, leaving the door open remained the only way.

She knew better by now than think any phrase, whether a cliché (regret does nothing but mar the present) or candor (I know you wouldn't do it if you had any other option), could bring him out of his darkness. It would pass, it always did, like the star-lit sky loses its battle against daybreak. Maybe in time they would lose their footing less and less. If anything, she feared the day they would no longer mourn what had been, for their luck rested upon the misfortune of more people she could count with both of their fingers.

Sara rested her head on his shoulder, relieved at the slight calm it brought to his breathing. Her eyes fell upon the coach and she remembered lying there, on her side, hearing her heaves subsiding, the madness in her head dissolving, the perception of her surroundings fading. She remembered her heartbeat slowing, letting it slow down even after she knew it had never been this faint and if she didn't do something, it would only grow weaker. As life was leaving her and she let it, there was one thing that would not slip from her mind, and years later, she finally didn't have to feel guilty about it anymore.

"I love you," she told him.

She left him in the living room and walked toward the bedroom, so barely furnished with second-hand wardrobes and pastel bedspread. She remembered her father, how hesitatingly he sat on the edge of the bed the few times he had given in and visited her in this place so beneath their social standing. Many words that should have remained unspoken, never thought of, had left his lips, and shame so often substituted the understanding she needed; but in the end, her dad had done the right thing. It cost him his life, and for all she knew, a string of his characteristically heartless decisions may follow it had he lived, but it was how she chose to remember him. The man who had done the right thing. He would probably despise Michael upon the first few meetings, but once he would let go of his ambitions, Sara chose to believe her dad would base his respect for Michael on who he was, not what he had done. And he would adore Bryce. His features softened by the passing years and his smile unburdened by the stress of his job, she could picture her father chasing the little boy around the park with joy he had never had time for when she had been little.

She opened the closet door to do away with the lump in her throat. There were the dresses she had worn during her father's campaigns, the ones plain enough for her to blend in rather than stand out enough to have no choice but oppose his creed; the couple she had bought in case she ever let anyone take her out as a woman, not an addict; the work clothes, just as dull and unrevealing as the code had instructed. That had been the one code she had not broken during her time in Fox River.

He didn't try to conceal his nearing steps. Her heart still did that jump when he stood behind her, close enough for her to feel his warmth yet with enough distance between them that she craved to annihilate it.

"I held to the idea of who I am for so long I think I have forgotten who I was," she told him, looking at the clothes of colors she would have never picked for herself now.

He reached out for a hanger with a blouse of a hue of gray she no longer recognized

"You wore this on the day we met," he said, and she didn't need to turn around to know he was smiling.

"Did I?"

"You don't remember? I am disappointed, Dr. Tancredi."

It was at that moment that she realized it was not only the past that made the return to this place feel so disjointed. She wasn't a Tancredi anymore; not in her heart, at least.

"Well, I'm not the hyper-observant one."

"As much as I wish it wasn't you in that infirmary," he said, putting the hanger back in the closet, "I have always been happy it was."

Later, when they let the door close on another chapter of the past they were finally on the verge of letting be, they both knew they would only get happier.

To Be Continued.

Broughttoyouby:::winter.