Part Twelve
Leaving Cameron behind him on the couch, even knowing that he was sleeping and that Tancredi was there if there should be problems, was nearly enough to make Alex feel as if all of the skin was shuddering off of his body at once. He grit his teeth against one another and forced his feet to take the slow steps down the hall and to the room that had been indicated for him. Alex still thought that he could feel the blood on his skin; he still thought that he could taste Michael Scofield on his mouth. Neither of these thoughts were helping his jangled nerves or helping to lessen the urgency with which he wanted a pill. Alex was not due one for at least another hour, so he pushed the thought away with an internal vehemence that might have startled him a few months before. He had a much better idea of what he was capable of now. After murderer and abandoner looked as if they might possibly be redeemed by a new role as justified traitor, he ought not to jeopardize that delicate balance any more than he had to. He was balancing on the edge of an outright addiction as it was.
"Unfortunately, there's no way to avoid going in partially blind," Scofield's father was saying as Alex found the room and stood in the doorway. It was already crowded with Aldo, Scofield and Burrows themselves and Burrow's teenaged son, the cool specter of Jane, and a man that Alex did not recognize who was seated at a laptop computer. The unknown man was leaning back in his seat with his arms laced behind his head, watching Aldo speak. Scofield and Burrows looked as if they could barely bring themselves to believe what Aldo was telling them, this possibility of it being over, in spite of any complications that might spring up along the way. Jane, Alex noticed a second later, did not appear to be paying Aldo any attention at all. She was watching Alex, and her normally shuttered eyes were written into something that looked as if it could be compassion. Alex wanted neither her pity nor her understanding; he broke eye contact with her so that he could refocus his attention on what the matter at hand.
"I haven't been able to find the firms that designed the house or installed its security," the man in front of the computer said, breaking off long enough to make a frustrated sound. "The Company didn't want to leave behind any chance of discovery that they didn't absolutely have to. So we can't hack into any blueprints or schematics." The man paused and dipped his head in Scofield's direction. "I understand that's your specialty. Anyway, the only way that we'll fully know what we're getting into is if we can find someone on the inside who's been there."
Aldo lifted his eyebrows in Alex's direction. He had acted as if he had not seen Alex when Alex had come to stand in the doorway, but Alex had seen enough old soldiers to know better. They didn't become old in the first place by being unaware of their surroundings; Alex doubted that there was very much at all taking place in this house that slid beneath Aldo Burrows's notice.
Alex was already shaking his head before the man at the computer even had time to finish his sentence. "Until two days ago, I thought that Lincoln Burrows was actually guilty." The man himself looked gratified to hear that. His brother had not ceased staring at Alex since his arrival. Someone really needed to pull Scofield to the side and tell him that that stare of his could be a liability as well as an asset.
"Blind it is, then," Aldo said. He glanced Jane's way. "Worked in Slovakia."
Her lips twitched. "Barely."
Turning back, Aldo continued. "Half of us will travel to Great Falls and retrieve Steadman." It was the careful euphemism that "retrieved" became that pricked Alex's ears more than anything else that Aldo had said. The man had once been a soldier. Alex knew that language. "The other half will go to Chicago and get the tape."
"Lincoln and I are going to Great Falls," Scofield said without hesitation. He was leaning back against the wall, arms folded across his chest, seemingly at ease with the entire situation. Only Alex knew how tense and wary Scofield actually was, because Alex was feeling it himself. Two peas in a pod. Alex touched his lips with his tongue before he could halt himself.
Aldo straightened, brow furrowing, and for a moment looked as if he wanted to be paternal. That might have been welcome thirty years before, but now Alex had a mind that all it would do would be to shatter beyond repair the balance that had been achieved thus far. "Linc and I are too well-known in Chicago," Scofield finished, a smile quirking the edge of his mouth. He looked inescapably smug before the gesture ended, in the way that certain smiles of his had a way of doing. Alex found that he really didn't mind; he was already in such a stew that he was in no mood to dissect any emotions that happened to come to the surface.
This was a bad time for him to need to violently wrest his priorities back into their proper order.
"So will I," Alex said. The twist of his mouth had none of the ironic pleasure of Scofield's own. He suspected that it made him look older.
Aldo paused, ripped away from the scolding that he had been preparing to give Scofield, while Jane straightened. Alex wanted to look her in the eye even less than he had before.
"We were thinking that you would be on the Chicago trip," Aldo said delicately. It was the very way that he said it, so solicitous, that made the hair on the back of Alex's neck stand on end. The sons that Aldo had walked away from had made it through the gauntlet without him and were now standing in the same room with him ready to clean up his messes. The son that Alex had nearly sacrificed his soul for, would do so again, and had still come within a hair's breadth of losing was sleeping, motherless, with the aid of sedatives a few rooms over and may well never be the same again. He had no right. These flashes of rage that came and then went, leaving him numbed and exhausted afterwards, were now something to be harnessed and held back rather than rooted out altogether.
"'We' do, do we?" Alex said with a brittle and angry smile, his voice ready to slice up the unwary like broken glass. To his surprise, it was Burrows rather than Scofield or even Jane who straightened up from his slouch and gave Alex a hard look. "I don't recall placing myself under your command."
"Bringing the Company to ground is more important than your revenge," Aldo told him, the Zen that he had wrapped himself in to that point cracking to reveal something that blazed.
Really? Aldo really thought that a good glare was going to make Alex back down and play nicely? If so, then he had foolishly not taken into account that Alex had been looking into the mouth of hell itself only a few hours before. "Don't you dare lecture me about revenge," Alex started in a low voice. He knew well enough the crimes that he had committed in the name of protecting his family, even for a short time. He would be damned before he would be talked down to by a man who had apparently gone one for decades before he had learned the lesson.
"I want to go to Chicago," Tancredi said from a point behind Alex's shoulder. She had come up so silently, and everyone had been so focused on Aldo and Alex, that Alex was not the only one who jumped slightly to hear her voice. Alex turned to look at her, his brow furrowing. "I can hear Cameron from here if he needs me," Tancredi said. To Aldo and the rest of the group she went on, "I need to deal with Chicago. And I, uh, would feel more comfortable if Jane were to come with me." Tancredi looked at Alex for a long moment, her eyes shuttered and grave, before she said, "No offense, but Michael and Lincoln need to put Great Falls to rest, and I would rather travel with someone who hasn't tried to kill me."
Alex's lips quirked before he could stop himself even he realized that the gesture was not likely to be reassuring. He had been under no orders to kill Sara Tancredi, but that could have changed at any moment. He doubted that being told that, if he had killed her, he would have done it to spare her whatever Kellerman had in mind would have put her mind at ease. The chances that Scofield had told her everything that he knew about the Company were far greater than the chances that he would have told David Apolskis anything of import.
Tancredi was a clever woman. Alex could see why she would be attracted to Scofield, and he to her. If Alex's cup was not already running over so hard with everything else that he had done over the past year, he might even take her cues. He and Scofield also tended to share a sense of tunnel vision, Alex had noticed. He wondered if Tancredi could be accused of the same, or if she was more of a big picture kind of woman.
"Sara, you don't have to be a part of this," Scofield told Tancredi. It was more animation than he had shown since Alex had entered the room, and the first time that he had looked at Alex at all. There was a void in the absence; Alex was beginning to despair that his priorities would ever be in their proper order again.
"I'm already a part of this, Michael," Tancredi said with a small and disbelieving laugh. She paused and cocked her head to the side, making Alex straighten, but continued when she did not hear anything that troubled her further. "If I'm already in over my head, then twelve feet of water and nine feet aren't really all that different. And I need…" Tancredi paused, straightened, and became a different woman from one moment to the next. Alex had already seen this woman a few times before, usually when she was holding a gun on him, and was so not surprised to see her reemerge now. Aldo and Lincoln were the only ones who lifted their eyebrows.
"I wasn't able to see my father buried," Tancredi finished in a calm voice that did not tremble. "I need to lay him to rest."
Aldo did not strike Alex as a man who was used to anything that did not fall out according to his orchestrations very often. In the deep gray haze that had enveloped him every since he had discovered Pam's body and pulled Cameron out from beneath the bed, broken only by those black and pulsing bursts of rage, it was a bit startling to discover that he could still be amused by anything at all. Aldo let out a long sigh that added one more nuance to Alex's belief that the man was really an old soldier, for this kind of chaos was unthinkable in a military setting. It was even making Alex's own head begin to ache.
"I can't pass the buck on this one," Tancredi finished.
"That's not what I meant, Doctor," Alex told her.
"No," Tancredi said in a level voice that would not let Alex determine whether she was saying no, she knew that was not what he meant or no, he was a liar. "But I need to do it."
Aldo sighed again and pinched at the bridge of his nose. He peeked at Jane beneath his hand as he did it, and Jane lifted her shoulders into a shrug that was almost too small to be noticed. "We'll leave tomorrow morning," he said. "If that's alright with everyone." The tone was nearly enough to make Alex smile.
A soft knock upon the doorframe announced Monica's presence. The doorway was becoming rather crowded at this point with people who knew how to move without making any sound at all. It was playing hell with Alex's nerves.
"Yes?" Aldo said.
"Miss Graves is on hold," Monica told Aldo after she had greeted everyone with a nod. "She wants that progress report."
"I said that I would talk to her when I actually had something to report," Aldo said. His tone was snappish enough to make Monica lean back and blink for a moment before she recovered.
"She was rather adamant." Monica made a slight face at Aldo. Alex had a feeling that the definition of adamant where this mysterious Miss Graves was concerned often took on an idiosyncratic and understated meaning.
"Tell her that I'll be there in a moment," Aldo said after sharing another one of his secret looks with Jane.
"Of course." Monica turned and ghosted away with no more noise to announce her departure than had announced her arrival. She touched at Alex's arm once in passing, even that brief moment of sympathy enough to make him jump.
Aldo pushed past them all so that he could follow Monica. Ben closed his laptop and stood himself, saying, "Looks like my job is done for the night." He moved, Alex noticed, every bit as quietly as Monica had. They had to learn it during orientation or something. With them gone, it was like being in the shack in New Mexico all over again, minus the presence of guns. Tancredi bore it for only a few seconds before she said, "I shouldn't leave Cameron alone for too long." She only made it a few steps before she stopped, her shoulders taut, and turned back. "And as a doctor, Agent Mahone, I'm advising you to get some sleep, too. If you want a sedative, I'll find something that won't interact with your current medication. But you look like refried hell."
"Is that a technical medical term?" Alex could not stop himself from asking.
"Learned it in first year," Tancredi responded. "I'm serious. You need the rest."
"As do we all." Alex scrubbed his hand over his face and glanced at the clock above the desk, which stated that it was no technically the morning that all of them had been waiting for. "I'd rather sit with Cameron."
"I can do that." Tancredi did not appear to be terribly ruffled by Alex's glare. Next time, he would argue with a doctor who had not spent an extensive amount of time working in a prison and dealing with men who killed people for a living. "Rest," Tancredi finished before she turned and walked away. While Scofield was only pulling his eyes away from Alex so that he might affix Tancredi with that drowning-pool stare of his, she did not look towards Scofield even once.
Jane ghosted out next, with a silence that rivaled Aldo's and Ben's and made Alex wonder if he was imagining things when he thought that any of these people actually had feet. Burrows followed next, his son in tow, though he did pause in order to fix Scofield with a warning look before he went. Alex did not need to be privy to the secret language of families in order to know what that look meant. Interesting, then, was the fact that Burrows made sure to shut the door after himself as he exited.
Alex rubbed at his eyes again as he and Scofield were left alone together, a gesture of exhaustion that he could not control even as sleep was the farthest thing from his mind. Scofield was still watching him, those eerie eyes as calm and nearly inhuman as Alex had always seem them. He had only been witness to Scofield losing control, coming down to earth, and joining the ranks of the human race a few times, usually when a threat to Burrows was somehow imminent. Alex had a urge to the do the most shocking thing that he could think of in order to break that cool composure and the make the chill ideal and puzzle that Alex had been chasing become human like the rest of them. It was not fair that he should remain so calm while Alex was only waiting for the next big event to come around the bend in the road and finally break him.
Scofield regarded the closed door with amusement for a few seconds before he said, "My brother is not subtle."
"I'd gathered that about him, yes," Alex said in a dry tone. Everything that he had read about Lincoln Burrows's previous crimes when he had first come on to the Fox River case had suggested a rhinoceros that had turned to crime out of a lack of direction and anything better to do. The lack of violence in his list of priors compared to the crime that he was sentenced to death for had sent a prickle up Alex's spine that he had not understood until earlier that day, but other than that there was very little about Lincoln Burrows that would cause people to refer to him as mysterious.
"He's not stupid, though," Scofield continued. "That's what a lot of people don't understand about him." He paused. "Which make me think that you and I aren't being subtle, either."
Alex had far too much to deal with right now, with finding a way to keep his son from being traumatized further and then getting him somewhere to heal from what had already happened, with trying to mitigate and atone for his own crimes. Not to mention that he was still trying to find a way to work within this new circle of people who were doing the same work that he had been doing before he had allowed himself to be jerked astray, even though the fact that every single one of them was a criminal and were seeking to bring down an entire administration was causing an ache of cognitive dissonance behind his eyes. Maybe he would even find some time in there to deal with his own grief over Pam's death and the role that he had indirectly played in it. What he did not have time for was a half-panicked game of 'Guess My Sexual Orientation' with Michael Scofield, and so Alex was opening his mouth to tell Scofield that it was fine, that he could right it off as strain and surplus adrenaline on both sides, and that it need not happen again.
Scofield's reflexes were faster than Alex ever would have guessed, as he hardly saw Scofield move before his mouth was upon Alex's. Alex raised his hand, still seeing danger everywhere, even- I especially /I -here, but Scofield caught his wrist. He held on loosely and made it clear that he was only interested in pausing Alex until Alex was sure that stopping was what eh really wanted. His tongue entered Alex's mouth and pulled a soft, reluctant sigh from the back of Alex's throat. Scofield struck Alex as the kind of man who had come into himself late in life, as it would take time before the opposite sex realized that Scofield's calm control was only that and not proof that he really was a dick, but Scofield was good at this. He ran his thumb along Alex's jaw, using his hand to hold Alex in place long after Alex had made it clear that he had no interest in pulling away. The loss of control would have rankled him once; now that he had so much on his shoulders that he felt as if he might be pressed down into the earth and never seen again, it was even a relief. He put his hands against the small of Scofield's back and jerked him closer, while Scofield's hand against Alex's jaw tightened. His mouth on Alex's was nearly angry, drawing Alex's lower lip into his mouth and then biting down on it hard enough to make Alex first flinch and then growl before he drove himself forward and even more fiercely against Scofield. Scofield didn't like uncertainty or chaos; Alex could have laughed. He cupped the back of Scofield's head as they were finally forced to part so that the two of them could breathe. Scofield did not fight the hand and seemed content to, for a few moments at least, remain still with his forehead pressed against Alex's own. Neither of them spoke. Neither of them, Alex was sure, even knew what to say.
End Part Twelve