Name: Her Ultimate Agenda

Characters: Sara Tancredi/mentions of Michael Scofield

Genre: POV, gen, het, dark-fic, angst, 'added scene'

Rating: PG-13

Word Count: approx. 1000 words

Summary: Michael gets sicker with every new day, every passing minute, each new-drawn breath. And despite her most desperate efforts, there is not a single damned thing she can do to stop it. So she is left to simply watch helplessly, while the man she loves keeps on destroying himself without a second thought, his mind solely, pathologically fixed on his single ultimate goal.

A/N: There is again, a scene near the middle of S4, that completely shatters my heart. And every time I see the screencaps or watch the scene itself, I feel like screaming or smacking Michael hard across the face for the way he is treating the woman he is supposed to love unconditionally. So here are my thoughts, put together from Sara's POV.

Her Ultimate Agenda

Michael has only one agenda. It's a simple one to explain, yet an almost impossible one to accomplish.

Bring the Company down.

There was a time when that was her agenda too. Or part of it, surely; but it's not anymore. Now, she has only one goal in her life. To ensure she won't be left completely alone in the world of six billion people.

So far, the state of Michael's matter is at a fifty-fifty chance. He may still get killed in his pursuits, yet there is a possibility he could succeed in the end.

The state of her agenda? Miserable. She is losing, utterly and completely failing in her task. Michael gets sicker with every new day, every passing minute, each new-drawn breath. And despite her most desperate efforts, there is not a single damned thing she can do to stop it. So she is left to simply watch helplessly, while the man she loves keeps on destroying himself without a second thought, his mind solely, pathologically fixed on his single ultimate goal. She tries to intervene, of course, tries to convince him to let go just a little bit, loosen the grip on his fixation the slightest bit and slow down his pace in order to see reason at last.

But he doesn't make it any easier for her, of course. He is stubborn, impossible and fighting her, all the while being completely ignorant of her only need for him, oblivious of the fact that her very survival depends on his own.

She is scared out of her mind at the thought of being left behind, of being left completely alone. No family, no friends, no love, and not a single person left to care if she breathes another day. She knows she wouldn't be able to survive that, she's always been a person dependant on social interactions, on relationships of any kind. She doesn't do 'lonely' good. That's what had driven her to drugs in the first place - loneliness. Solitude of her life with not a person to care about her.

Of course, one might argue she could get that back, could rebuilt her life, make new relationships, find new friends. However, she is too exhausted by this point of her life to even consider such a notion. She's been to hell and back in the past few months, and she lacks the energy to hope that one can rebuilt everything they've lost. Besides, how can you start to rebuild something when to gain what you once had, has taken nearly thirty years to establish in the first place?

No, that's definitely not a path for Sara to walk, and therefore, this is the ultimate lottery. Either she wins or loses completely, no shades of grey involved. There is either her, with Michael, surviving, or that is the end to the both of them, no matter how pitiable it may sound to her own ears. She is tired of pretending, tired of playing the tough one. She never was one like that in the first place. On the emotional level, she's always been a wreck, damaged goods. Not fixable, never completely fixable, but pretty well workable, with the right treatment and care of course. The care of a man she is currently missing on every possible level of interaction.

So when he once again pushes her away, rejects her help or ignores her pleas, she feels the abyss coming a little bit closer, and she nearly welcomes it. In her darkest hour, she is deeply hurt to think that Michael probably cares about as little for her life as he does for his own. How else could she explain his careless behavior to his own health, when he surely knows how interconnected their ultimate faiths are, she's made herself clear on that on several occasions.

Nothing is going to come between us.

Whether that be circumstances, enemies, or death. Her father would probably be utterly disdained by such Shakespearean thoughts on his daughter part, because Frank Tancredi has never been a quitter. That's why it stings and burns so much when remembering his death was marked a suicide. That stain - no matter if cleaned in the end - will never completely disappear.

She sends a silent plea to her father to forgive her, for she had sinned. Brought up in religion - never minding she never truly believed in God she was taught to revere - she is seriously considering the ending of her life.

Her only extenuating circumstance is that she doesn't think of termination in the classical sense of the word. She is not thinking about suicide, about taking an overdose of morphine or jumping off a cliff. She is simply thinking in the realms of not being able to exist in a world without a single person caring about her.

Little does she know that Michael, always the planner, has already taken care of that – albeit unintentionally and completely coincidentally. Not even a master planer like him could have come up with a scheme like this, a design of faith itself. A formula in which - even if the most dark case scenario would come to being - there would actually exist one person, a tiny and extremely vulnerable one, whose presence would mean everything to Sara, and vice versa. The existence of a person that would love and cherish her each word, each caress, each smile, unconditionally.

A beloved child - the reason for almost any woman to live. It's an instinct as old as mankind itself.

As for now, however, Sara isn't aware of this precious piece of information. And so the only thing left for her is to pray to a God she doesn't believe in, and try with all her might to do absolutely anything in order to keep Michael alive, whether her endeavors are welcomed or not. Because no matter if he likes it or not, they're a part of her very own survival instinct too.

xxx