Disclaimer: I don't own Prison Break, Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, or Angel. Nor do I profit from writing this. Please don't sue me. Most of the action and some of the lines are taken directly from Prison Break episode #6: "Riots, Drills, and the Devil (pt. 1)".
A/N: Imzadi, as usual, you rock my world with your reviews.
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The part of Cass's brain that had been drilled in martial combat for centuries kicked in, and she slammed her foot into the big man's crotch. He grunted and doubled over, giving her the chance to push past him and back into the office.
Mind a whirl, she looked around for something to block the door. The kick to the groin would only stall him for a few minutes, and then he'd be back after her again and pissed. Putting her shoulder to the desk, she shoved it in front of the door even as the inmate hit the glass.
"Come on, doc!" he bellowed, pressing his face against the reinforced glass in the door. His hand on the glass made it shake in its frame, and suddenly the Oracle didn't have much faith in the crisscrossing wires between the panes.
The other prisoners were up off their beds, circling around the other windows in the office. One against five. One of the inmates had his arm in a sling and another—a scrawny, annoying looking white man—was favoring one leg. Maybe…maybe if she were in her own body (or at least a familiar one) with her powers, maybe then she could take them. But if Dr. Tancredi worked out, it was to keep her thighs from getting too big, not to build up fighting muscle. There was no way out of the office except the way she came in.
Oh, lord, she'd trapped herself in a fucking fishbowl!
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Lindsey looked at the projection of the devil's head on the wall. "Now, I know the man," he said, gesturing to the devil, "Has some crazy powers. I dabbled with a few of them, but how is he supposed to get us through that wall? Unless he comes with a sledgehammer? It's going to take us months to break through this with your precious eggbeater."
Scofield just wiped the sweat off his forehead and smirked. The man's know-it-all smile was starting to get on the former lawyer's nerves. "We don't need a sledgehammer."
And he tossed him the eggbeater. Lindsey just raised his eyebrow.
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The Oracle's eyes flashed from one part of the cramped office to the other, evaluating everything as a potential weapon and then discarding it. The hypodermic needles might be good as a last resort, and the cabinet full of drugs looked promising, but she didn't know what any of them did. The last thing she needed was to pump one of these crazed…animals full of stimulant on accident.
Suddenly, the incessant, frantic pounding on the glass stopped, and she looked up, almost scared at what could have drawn the prisoners away.
It was the prison guard. She'd forgotten all about him. "Shit," she whispered even as she heard a voice over his shoulder radio asking if everything was all right in sick bay.
One of the inmates had the CO's face pressed up against a pipe so tightly she was afraid his skull would crack under the pressure. "All clear in sick bay," he managed to growl into the radio, but the look in his eyes spoke volumes about what this guard thought about being used by inmates. He wasn't scared, he was angry, and angry people did very stupid things in situations like this.
I need to get out of here, and I have to take him with me, Cass thought.
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The sounds of the riot echoed down to Lindsey's ears. Michael had noticed as well, judging by the way he was looking at the ceiling rather than at what he was doing.
"Focus, Scofield," Lindsey barked, shaking the theoretically useful eggbeater in his cellmate's direction. "We are not going to get your brother out if you don't do your hoodoo on this concrete wall."
'Brother' turned out to be the magic word that dragged the man's attention back onto the here and now. "I…" he started to explain but trailed off.
"You never meant for it to go this far," Lindsey finished for him. "You didn't want people to get hurt, but you needed time and the best way to get it was a lock-down and the best way to get a lock-down was to rile the prisoners up."
"And now people could be dying up there," Michael added, his gaze wandering back to the ceiling.
"Because of you." It was harsh, but it was the truth. They didn't have time to play nice at the moment. For the first time, Lindsey started to wonder if maybe Scofield was in over his head. Prison was a whole other world from the cushy world of structural engineering that the man had apparently inhabited before getting wrapped up in all of this. "Michael, I'm not in this body because I was a nice man when I was alive. I was so untrustworthy that when the good guys decided lay the smack down on the bad and I volunteered to help, they decided I could help all I want but then I needed to die afterward."
"They betrayed you."
"At least I was facing my shooter when he pulled the trigger," Lindsey muttered sourly. "And I'd betrayed them plenty on other occasions, so I suppose it was only fair."
Scofield didn't say anything, just looked at him with unreadable eyes.
"Look, I worked for the law firm that fabricated the evidence used to put your brother away. Some very bad men want your brother dead, and if they went to all this trouble to frame him, it means there's something larger at stake."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying I doubt Burrows was chosen at random. Either something tied him to Terrance Steadman or Wolfram & Hart wanted him dead for another reason." He'd been turning this over in his head for days now but still couldn't find any answers. He was pretty sure he'd never heard the name Lincoln Burrows not in connection with Steadman's murder back when he was at Wolfram & Hart, but that didn't mean much. It could have been handled at another branch of the law firm or was of high enough importance that he didn't have the clearance to see it.
"My brother was fired from one of Steadman's companies a few weeks before the murder," Scofield supplied.
"Something tells me it's more than that. Now, explain to me how we're getting through this wall."
"Ever hear of tensile strength, Hook's Law of Elasticity? If we drill holes in strategic locations, we compromise the load-carrying capacity of the wall."
It was loony enough that it made sense. "Like pressure points in martial combat," Lindsey murmured as he looked up at the projected devil with new respect.
Michael took the striped down eggbeater from him. "Sort of—we go in through the tip of each horn, the eyes, the end of the nose, the bottom of the fangs, and the end of the braids. Makes a kind of 'X'. Let's get to it."