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)". The magazine Lincoln sort of mentions is National Geographic, November 2004.

-----

They'd had to switch off after Scofield finished drilling the first hole. Punching through concrete with an eggbeater was exhausting work—especially in this Godforsaken heat. Lindsey was tempted to ask his cellmate to restore the AC, but he had a feeling that whatever Michael had done to the unit was a bit more permanent than just flicking the on / off switch. "So…what if we do all this work, and the pipe we want is ten feet that way?" he asked.

"It won't be."

"You got x-ray vision?"

"I calculated the drill point coordinates, hid them in my tattoo, and then projected them back onto the wall. Everything's been worked out so the image hits the right spot. It's just math."

"What if your math is wrong?"

"You'll drill into one of a dozen gas lines behind the wall and in the explosion be burned alive."

"Oh, great—now you tell me."

From somewhere overhead came a crash that made both their heads shoot up. "That was the toilet," Michael murmured.

"Can this get any worse?"

-----

Apparently, an inmate wielding a plastic desk chair was enough to fracture reinforced glass if the inmate was large enough. Another piece of useless trivia that Cass wished she'd never been in a situation to find out. Her fishbowl was starting to crack.

Time for drastic measures. Taking the stapler off the desk, she used it to smash the glass-front doors on the medicine cabinet. She was still going to stick to her 'Drugs Bad' plan from earlier, but the glass itself might make a good weapon. Striping off her white lab coat, she balled it up and used it to pick up the largest of the glass shards. The prisoners weren't the only ones who could make shanks.

The Oracle crouched down beside the exam table, holding the piece of glass at the ready in front of her. If these inmates wanted to play, then they were going to have to come to her.

-----

Michael didn't know what to expect as he squirmed through the hole that led from the service corridor to his cell. A beaten and bloody CO sitting on his bunk wasn't high on the list of possibilities, but that's what he found. The guard was a fairly young man with a round baby face. Scofield had never seen him before, which suggested this was either his first day or he was assigned to some other portion of the prison. Maybe both, he amended as he watched the man look nervously from him to the other men standing in the cell—Abruzzi and T-bag.

"Yeah, we…we have a problem," Abruzzi informed him as if Michael didn't already know.

"Oh, yeah, that's right—Bob here's seen the hole," T-bag chimed in. "He's gotta go away."

If the CO, Bob, wasn't assigned to Gen Pop, than A-wing wasn't as securely locked down as it should be. Which meant there could be prisoners swarming all over the inside of Fox River. Shit. And T-bag was right, Bob knowing about the hole was the worst possible scenario. He seemed like a genuinely good guy—he just had that kind of face—and he'd feel obligated to tell the warden. Sure, Abruzzi could probably use his Mob connections to put pressure on Bob to stay silent, but Michael didn't want something like that on his conscience. What if the guard had a wife? Kids?

Michael turned away from the guard, the pervert, and the Mob boss and rested his head against the rough cinder block wall.

But what if threatening the CO's family meant the difference between Lincoln living or dying? He come this far and done this much to save his brother. He couldn't just stop now. But maybe he could stall until more options presented themselves. "No one's going anywhere," he said calmly, turning back around to face T-bag.

"He's seen the hole!" Bagwell repeated as he stepped up to get in Michael's face.

Michael kept his face expressionless. He'd gotten very good at that since landing himself in prison.

Abruzzi stepped up as well, leering menacingly at T-bag. "And so have you."

"This can't be good."

Everyone paused to look down at the Sucre-who-wasn't-Sucre as the man wormed his way out of the hole. The look he gave Michael said that he understood the intricacies of the situation, but he was going to follow Michael's lead.

He looked from Sucre to Bob the Guard. "I have a daughter…please," the man begged in a quiet voice that made Michael's gut clench. What was he doing here? This was all wrong. Lincoln, he reminded himself. He had to stay focused; he had to keep thinking of Lincoln and the electric chair.

"We gotta kill him," T-bag pressed.

So lockdown had been a bad idea. But it wasn't going to last forever. The guards and local police were probably already gathered outside, working on a plan of attack. Standard operating procedure in a case like this said the first thing the warden was going to do was kill the AC to make the prisoners uncomfortable. Well, Michael had already taken care of that for him. Then, they'd shut off the water and the sewage. The toilets in all the cells would begin to backup, and the stench combined with the heat was sure to drive the prisoners to some kind of compromise. Or whip them into a murderous frenzy, he added mentally.

"The cops are right outside," he barked at T-bag.

The murderer cocked his head.

"And they'll stay outside," Michael continued. He glanced over at Abruzzi, hoping he was seeming reasonable to the Mob boss. "As long as we're keeping him alive."

"But he's a guard…he's gonna squeal!" T-bag protested. Reasonable rarely worked on the man, Michael was discovering. His perverse appetites seemed to drive him right past logic…unless logic suited his purposes.

"What the hell does this have to do with you anyway?" Abruzzi demanded. Michael watched as he leaned in close to T-bag, until their noses were only centimeters apart. A drop of sweat ran down the side of Abruzzi's face and fell onto T-bag's. "This is not any of your concern." His voice was low, threatening. The same voice he'd used when he'd ordered a set of garden sheers taken to two of Michael's toes. Suddenly, Scofield was very aware of the dull ache in his foot and the heavy bandage stuffed into his boot.

T-bag, though, didn't seem to have the brains to realize just how much trouble he was in. Either that, or he figured he had the upper hand as he shrugged out from under Abruzzi and turned to Michael with a sneer. "So, Bob here knows about our secret. He knows about our escape."

So, the pervert wanted in on the plan. Unacceptable. The man had raped and murdered multiple teenagers across the state of Alabama. He'd even been on America's Most Wanted. If it came down to killing T-bag or helping him escape, Michael just might choose to kill him.

Even as he thought that, he knew it wasn't true. He'd come to Fox River to save a man's life…but not at the expense of another, not even a scumbag like T-bag.

Over T-bag's shoulder, Michael could see Abruzzi begin to chuckle softly. He would have no qualms about killing someone, and he might just take matters into his own hands if he thought Michael was being too weak.

"So it's all of our concern now, isn't it?" T-bag continued, still sneering.

-----

Lincoln Burrows woke up face-down on concrete. Unfortunately, this wasn't the first time he'd ended up in this position. He'd done a lot of drugs before being sent to Fox River for a murder he hadn't committed. Drugs and concrete always seemed to go hand-in-hand.

He was clean now—had been since they'd handed down his death sentence. It was hard enough to get the drugs here in prison—expensive too—but it got even harder when you were on Death Row. Plus, he'd rather spend his money on magazines to keep him occupied while he was shut up in his cell with nothing to do. The money that had once gone up his nose now went to sending his kid a birthday card and educating himself about evolution, sloth bears, and the Maya underworld.

That still didn't explain the concrete or the pain in his head or…the tiny tongue licking his face. He opened his eyes to find himself looking into the big brown eyes of a small brown and black cat. She licked his nose once more for good measure and then sat back, watching him.

"Hey, Marilyn," he mumbled as he rolled over onto his back, trying to assess the damage the other cons had done. One of the COs, Bob, had been taking him back to his cell when they'd been jumped by T-bag and some of his boys. Now, Bob was a good guy, and Linc had no love for T-bag since the jackass had it in for his brother. So, defend Bob—who never put the cuffs on tighter than he had to and who kept him up-to-date on baseball—and beat the shit out of T-bag in the process? It hadn't really been a choice.

Unfortunately, jackals like Bagwell traveled in packs. Six against one wasn't good odds, even if his prison nickname was "the Sink". The pain in his head was worse than his worst hangover, he decided. He raised a hand to his forehead and felt the lump from where he'd head-butted someone to get the fight started. He'd have a funny looking bruise for a couple of days, but the other guy would be lucky to have a small skull fracture. Michael always said he had a hard head.

Marilyn meowed and flicked her tail impatiently. Easing himself up into a sitting position, he reached over and scratched the little cat under her chin. "What're you doing running around by yourself? Where's Westmoreland?" Marilyn was the last remainder of an old prison program to try and pacify inmates by giving them pets. Her owner, Westmoreland, was the Old Head of Gen Pop. He'd been at Fox River since the late '70s and wasn't going anywhere.

Marilyn bumped her head against Lincoln's palm and then looked pointedly down the hall.

With a grunt, Linc struggled to his feet, scooping the little cat up in one hand. "You're right. We need to get out of here—I've got to find Michael before he gets himself shanked." Which way though? He couldn't afford to get waylaid en route to A-wing.

"You looking for Scofield?"

Linc whirled (and immediately wished he hadn't as the movement made his head throb impossibly hard) to find one of the newer prisoners—big guy with the sort of muscles usually seen on pro weight lifters. "Yeah, Turk."

The big man nodded. "Come on." And then headed down a nearby stairwell.

As far as Lincoln knew, that wasn't a way into A-wing, but his brother had been crawling all over the prison working on his crazy plans for an escape. Trust Michael to be down in the bowels of Fox River during a riot when he should be staying in the relative safety of his cell. Preferably hiding in the very back and armed with a shank. Tucking Marilyn closer to his chest, Lincoln headed down the stairs after Turk.

-----

"Now, you listen, pervert! You're in as much trouble as he is, you understand?"

Lindsey watched as Abruzzi slammed T-bag against the walkway rail outside his and Michael's cell. Said pervert tried to squirm away, but the Mob boss kept a firm grip on him. John Abruzzi may be getting on in years, but he was still not a man to mess with. And, thankfully, he had taken on the job of intimidating T-bag. Somehow, Lindsey didn't think Cass would have looked too highly on him doing it.

"Go ahead! Go ahead! Stick me! Stick me!" Bagwell hissed as the two grappled. "How many times do you think I can shout out about your little hole before I bleed out? Huh? Every con in here's gonna know 'bout your little escape before one drop of my blood hits the floor. So, you see, friends, either I'm through that hole with you or I'm gonna sing like Johnny Cash."

Michael bristled, and Lindsey moved until he was just inside the door to the cell. If T-bag tried to make a run for it, they could take him down, but probably not before he let the whole world know their little secret…and what a mess that would be. This situation could not possibly get any worse. And what the hell had he been doing in their cell with a CO anyway?

And if Scofield's reaction to the CO was any indication, then the man didn't have the stomach for any of the dozens of ways Lindsey could think of for Abruzzi to handle their current situation. Snapping T-bag's neck and pitching him over the rail was probably the cleanest. It wasn't the nice thing to do, but it might be their only way to keep the con silent. "Go assess the situation," Lindsey murmured to his cellmate.

"What?" Michael looked back at him, a parade of conflicted and unhappy emotions in his eyes.

"Go—John and I will take care of this." When it came down to it, Michael's hands were clean, and Lindsey's weren't. He wasn't going to let a sleazebag like Bagwell ruin a good man like Michael Scofield.