Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me, not Prison Break, not Michael, not Sara… lame but true.
Spoilers for all the first season.
Although English isn't my first language, Lisa makes this possible.
Thank you.
All the reviews are truly welcome.
Summary: After the escape Sara and Michael lives are still connected.
Title: Some nights.
By Lylou
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When Sara opened her eyes, he wasn't there.
The fact is that she wouldn't have hoped to find him; it was too long that she already wasn't hoping to do it, but during a second after waking up, she always was thinking:
"Maybe..."
His autumn smell still hung suspended in the room like a distant memory, and the bed sheets still had his familiar and asphyxiating warmth.
But he wasn't there anymore.
Sara looked at the green numbers on her alarm-clock and saw that it was 10 a.m. Surely Michael was in his car, driven to where he was hidden to the whole world, including her.
Now Sara could only wait until he would miss her so much that he would risk it all to see her again.
But that always finished in the same way.
He must go away, must disappear again for the horizon every morning, as if her life was a fucking Hollywood movie.
She always promised herself that that was going to be the last time, that she would never open her door at midnight again, that she would stop comparing all the men that she knew with Michael... that she would search the way to have a normal life at last, and maybe, for the first time, Sara would permit to herself to be happy.
But all those good purposes were lasting too little in her mind depressed and still sleepy, because she knew very well they never would be able to escape the circle of fire and desperation in that they were trapped.
Sara wanted to laugh sadly but in she didn't get it, she thought that she could delay the breakfast awhile, she was not hungry, she just was feeling all the muscles of her body made numb by the tiredness that only causes the desperate sex. If she closed her eyes, Sara could even feel the invisible trail of his kisses, burning her skin, his smell trapped among her hair, his hands over her body... all those sensations always were slow to vanish.
Even sometimes, before they would sleep together, Sara could feel his greenish look running over her at the supermarket, in the video-club or while she was going back to her apartment at nights.
At the beginning she always turned around, searching for his eyes of liquid fire among the people, but she never saw him.
And then, without knowing very well how, she just decided that he was really there, watching her, and she stopped turning around to search for him.
Like that cold morning at the hospital.
She knew it, when she woke up she knew without a doubt that Michael had been there.
Sara knew it because his smell was still trapped in the room, like after one of his night time visits. She knew it then because his silent words where still floating in the room, same as the electrons floating around before a big storm.
It was something that only she could know.
And now, eight months after all that, Sara knew that what they where doing was the least bad of all their options. They were living a voluntary tragedy.
Because she knew that an empty bed in the mornings and the smell of sex trapped in the air, was the closest thing to a normal life that they would never have.
And they both knew that it was the right thing because it hurts, and because every lonely morning was making them bleed and feeling dead.
Or desiring to be it.
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Michael was at his new home again.
He liked that house, that's why he had chosen it, because of that, and because of a million other paranoid reasons that seemed very important in the past, but then, when he was planning his breakout, it all seemed very simple.
Entering, and going out with Lincoln.
And now the familiar voice in his brain assaulted him without pity once again:
"It doesn't seem so simple anymore...does it?"
He crossed the garden and felt the intense smell of the sea-salt filling up his lungs, from where he was, Michael could see the sea. He perfectly knew that there were exactly twelve wooden steps of stair until the dock; he would have liked showing it to her.
He would have liked that Sara would have said this time: "Take me with you."
That she would have sat at his side in the car and would have trusted him enough to let him take her there, to begin a new and different life at his side.
But that would never happen.
Because Michael knew that it was one thing to make love desperately with him every time that he was going to see her, and another, very different, thing to gather up the trust that she needed to get up to his BMW and let him drag her along to his world again.
But Michael still had the blurred hope that maybe she would whisper it some early morning, when only the yellowish light of the streetlamps pass off from the window blinds, and Sara was a warm shade backed up against his own body, maybe then he would hear it: "Take me with you."
But not.
Then Michael heard a car outside the fence and turned, he saw a dark suburban and he knew immediately who was there.
-"I came here yesterday… and you weren't"
His older brother smiled, with more love than humor, and walked to the fence that opened again.
-"I know, sorry... I had something important to do."
-"Sure..."
Again he looked at Michael, with that mixture of melancholy and affection that Lincoln always looked at him whenever he needed it.
Michael liked feeling like the younger brother, and he realized that he was feeling the same overflowing and needy love that he always felt for his older brother when they were children.
-"And… How is she?"
-"I don't know what you are talking about Linc..."
Michael turned around and began to walk toward the house, followed by his brother.
-"Sure…
I never had asked this to you Michael, but you thanked her, right?
We wouldn't be here now if it weren't for her"
-"Yes... I thanked her."
Again that melancholic look of the ones that have looked too much into the abyss, that only they two could understand.
-"You no longer offer a coffee to the invitees?"
-"Technically Linc, you are not an invitee"
Michael smiled, probably for the first time all day, and entered into the kitchen.
-"How is LJ?"
-"You know, being a teenager sucks, the most of the time he just hates me."
-"Tell him... that everything could have been worse
Lincoln smiled slowly and his look went away in his brother, who was standing close to the wooden worktop, waiting for the coffee maker to begin its work.
-"Normally he is annoyed with me, or he blames me, or I discover him crying over while he watches Grey's Anatomy …"
The two brothers laughed in the kitchen while the coffee was beginning to smell, and for a second, both seemed like children again, like if they never would have had to become strong and sad.
-"He adores you Linc, you just... give him some time."
-"Time is all that we have, isn't it?
... Sometimes I feel as if we never would have gotten away from that place."
-"I know ... but we did."
-"Yes... and how are you Michael?"
-"I'm... fine."
-"Of course, I forgot that you are always well."
Michael smiled with no humor and caught two cups off his new and impersonal kitchen's wardrobe, which had filled with the newly made coffee smell, and then Lincoln could see how his brother's look was going away at the Pacífic through the window.
-"Do you regret Michael?
Do you sometimes regret breaking me out of there?"
Michael looked in silence at his brother and his voice sounded low but sure when he talked:
-"Never…
But some nights I think that I would have liked having had another option then."
-"You didn't have it... and you don't have it now."
-"I know, but I would like that she know it."
-"She knows it Michael."
-"Do you believe that the things will be different sometimes Lincoln?"
-"Things always change, and nobody, not even you, can prevent it.
It's the only thing of what I am sure of in this world Michael."
-"... Do you ever think of how your life would be, if you hadn't entered into that garage that night?"
Lincoln smiled slowly and looked at his brother.
- "Every day.
I always think about how it would it all be now, how our lives would be if I hadn't of gone that night to blow up the brain of that miserable man.
But I know one thing now Michael, if it wouldn't have been of that way, it would have been another.
I was in the final countdown Michael."
-"... You never had told it to me before."
-"I was stupid Michael but I would do it again, because it was a very small price for my son's life."
Michael looked through the window to the ocean, and asked himself what she would be doing right now.
Maybe she would be thinking about him, damning him or missing him desperately, or maybe she would be naked close to another man.
"We wouldn't be here now if it weren't for her."
Michael smiled, but his brother's words were suspended in his kitchen's air a few seconds more.
Michael was good with the numbers, the possibilities and the obsessive calculations, but his brother was the specialist in the people, and it had always been this way.
Lincoln had a special skill for people, which was very ironic because his personal relations always had been a disaster.
-"Linc... you sound like a fortune cookie."
Lincoln smiled and looked at Michael, like if he has discovering fot the first time, that his little brother was an adult man, and not a little boy persecuted by the nightmares.
-"We got it Michael."
-"Yes... we got it."
-----------------------
The storm and the warm rain were beating the window and the terrace's door without pity, Michael had left the blinds opened trying, unsuccessfully, to combat intense heat.
He could sense the familiar furniture around when some lightning was quickly illuminating the room.
It was hot.
A lot.
Wet hot aggravated brutally by the storm outside, and Michael already was resigned to stay another night without sleep, for the third time that week."
He had gotten accustomed to the signals.
The unequivocal signals that made him known when he was the moment to take his BMW and drive to Chicago again, crossing a country and half other in silence, to wait among the shades of sidewalk across the street of her apartment.
Too much heat.
With the new and fleeting shine of a new flash of lightning, Michael could see all his clothing scattered to the bed's feet, but that disorder of clothing was nothing compared to the one that was on the floor of her apartment every time he went to visit her.
Those nights his clothes were spread, furious and desperate, all over the floor.
But now only was there, useless, like to remind him that she wasn't there, that she
would never be.
But sometimes, in stormy nights like that, Michael turned around insomniac in his big and empty bed, and during a second, he always was hoping to find her there.
And then he only was missing her more.
And he was hating her.
And hating himself.
His body wanted to sleep, but his brain wasn't agreeing, so he opened the terrace's door and went out with the useless hope to breathe some fresh air.
He felt the cold and humid tiles below his bare feet, and a chill climbed lazily at
his back.
He could see the Pacific perfectly from there, at the end of the wooden steps of stair that they were gnashing when he was getting down to the beach's little dock, he liked that house, it wasn't too wrong to be another prison..
The rain was warm and sticky, so much that Michael wasn't almost able to feel his own skin getting wet under the water; he closed his eyes slowly and thought about her again. He thought if it would be raining right now in Chicago, if Sara would be also seeing the humid land, lighting up magically, for the intense and electric light of the bolts of lightning.
But Michael thought that that was impossible, he sincerely was thinking that she wasn't like him, that Sara wasn't having to look out the terrace in a stormy night, to feel alive.
Michael was not knowing, or wasn't wanting to know, that Sara was also wanting to run and to hide.
The thud of a thunder close to him scared Michael, and he felt again like his first night in Fox River, the place that had stolen it all from himself.
Or almost all.
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Sara hated Christmas.
Since... always, even when she was a little girl, those dates made her feel unhealthily lonely.
She never had known what he was to meet like a family, the gifts, and the decorations... all that always had been extraneous to her, like if it was a stop at a station that the "honourable" Tancredi family had never stopped at.
And every year, as soon as was approaching the date and she was beginning to see the streets adorned Sara only was wanting to run and to hide, to vanish to maybe quit feeling so... lonely.
What was the Christmas like where he was?
In all those months of desperate visits at midnight, Sara never asked him where or with who he was living now.
Sara didn't want to know anything about his new life, like if he was two different men, one that left needy and warm kisses on her skin, and the other, the one that was vanishing before she woke up and may say "Good-bye.".
She never had asked and he never answered, Sara wasn't a jealous woman, especially under those circumstances, although imagining Michael's familiar and warm mouth, sliding on a skin that wasn't hers, produced the feeling of the biggest loneliness that she ever had felt.
But in spite of that, she would have understood it.
She wasn't precisely in a position to judge him.
Because she was sleeping accompanied almost three nights a week, she wasn't exactly in love with him, but the sex was good, and even more important, when she was with him, Sara always felt herself a little less lonely.
And he seemed to be a solitary man too, solitary and mysterious.
He was called Jack and she had known him at the coffee shop of her block's corner, five months before.
Sara didn't remember seeing him there before, but one day, there he was, charming, nice, sweet... just too good to be true.
Just... like Michael.
And for that reason she began to suspect.
She was tired of being broken and used by the different men in her life, beginning with her father, that had abandoned her since she was little girl, and ending with Michael, who had flipped her life and her world upside down with his greenish look and his warm voice.
And she didn't even want to think about the rest of the men that disappointed her.
Sara was tired of all that crap, and that is why, when she had met Jack she made the decision that it never would happen anymore to her.
And that's why she investigated him; she spied and followed him during days.
She was lying to a man and letting him lie to her too.
It wasn't like if she had a job or a career waiting for her, and it was different being in the other side of the lie for once, and that how Sara had discovered months ago, that Jack wasn't Jack, but a secret service agent called Paul Kellerman.
To be continued...