There was no denying Lincoln was nervous as he took the bus to Beverly that morning, where, as far as he knew, his little brother still lived.
Lincoln had never been good with denial.
"If he wants to throw me out, it's his right. I deserve that. We're brothers, but we're also two concerned citizens. Just want to help. That's all. Just –" His pointless mumbling got lost in one deep sigh as he wrapped forehead in his palm.
It was no good.
Of course, he missed him. He felt Michael's absence several times, every day. Things to say to him popped through his mind, like the reflex to try and move your arm when it's been amputated. It made it worse that his loss didn't provoke unmitigated pain. Guilt had built itself into a massive wall he came up against, whenever fond memories of childhood swept through his brain. A huge, black wall that Lincoln could see; not made of bricks or mortar or any definable material, but pulsing, the curse it whispered in harmony with Lincoln's heartbeat.
If I touch it, Lincoln thought, it'll suck me in, and I'll never manage to crawl my way out.
He pictured himself, entangled in the tar-black substance as it walled him in, coaxed him into compliance.
Guilt, melancholy, Lincoln was sure, were things that took hold of you not because of the horrors you'd done, but depending on whether you ceased to resist.
And he could feel its pull, cold and dark, but sweet with the promise of relief. Give yourself to me, yes, completely… Do you feel the pointlessness of all things that draw you away? You come back to me in the end. Sooner or later, I'll have you. We shall both go to the grave like silent friends.
Lincoln shook his head.
There were still things to do, still rightness to be found in the world.
At the idea, Lincoln thought of the restaurant, and the table by the window that overlooked the whole of Chicago.
A few times since he'd worked here, a woman had sat there, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied, and Lincoln had noticed something about her he hadn't immediately tried to identify – just something that came off different from the Everest's usual clients.
She was always polite to Lincoln and his colleagues, made direct eye-contact when she thanked them or when they took her order. She had very blue eyes, and very black hair, and very white skin. The first few times Lincoln had noticed her, when a different waiter was taking care of her table, and she had merely been another impeccably-dressed in a restaurant full of chic people, he had thought her pretty. But there had been something unsettling, unexpected, about the first time he had really looked at her.
Unprepared for surprises, Lincoln had come in with his usual attitude that customers liked so much. Familiar yet not intrusive. Charming but not flirty.
From the moment her direct blue eyes stared back at him, Lincoln felt immediately, not only her difference, but her strength – few people inspire it so naturally, in such a disarming way. Her face from up close was a near-transparent whiteness, freckled, and more unusual than he had first thought in those unmindful glimpses. A striking blend of honesty and opaqueness. Lincoln was good at reading people, and the signs about this woman were all there for him to see, but popped like soap bubbles when he tried to make them fit into anything concrete.
Such depths, he thought, when he met the woman's gaze, as if her soul had roots all the way to the center of the earth. She's not here for show. Maybe that was the most obvious thing that made her stand apart from the other clients. She's not here forshow.
Lincoln tried to shake off the feeling of awe as he took her order, tried to be his cool habitual self, not so much because he thought she would like it but as if to prove himself that he could.
He recommended port wine with today's special but wasn't surprised at her polite smile of dismissal. People here enjoyed being told what to eat or drink by a waiter – it took them out of their comfort zone, actually thrilled them a little, but it was clear this woman knew her own mind.
He'd noticed she came here with a different man every time, when she came accompanied, and Lincoln felt it added to the overall depth of her enigma.
"My clients like this table," she said, when Lincoln made what he felt was an especially trite comment on the view. Her voice made him think of crystal-clear waters, that you can see through, but whose particular cold touch mystifies and enthralls.
As she said this, she turned her face towards the great window, and Lincoln was free for a few seconds to look at her face – to look at someone in a way you can only dare when they don't look back at you. Real admiration is always a unilateral process. Paintings at a museum are there to receive your gaze, not share it, and yet, the moment the young woman met his eyes anew, Lincoln felt like this was the only way to really describe it. A steel, powerful hold over his whole being. A little uncanny. Like a work of art had inexplicably looked back at him.
"Clients?" He repeated.
Felt every word out of his mouth was one already too often spoken, bland food whose savor had long been chewed out of it.
"I think it's the freedom it inspires," she said, touched her lips to the glass of iced water on the table. "This view. It's an easy trick – open sights. The illusory control you get, looking at the world from above. Not that all my clients' freedom is in danger. But if you were going to risk time in prison, this is the sort of sight you'd want to look at as long as you can. Don't you think?"
Lincoln looked silently at her for a while. None of his easy jokes were in order. He felt like a buffoon, and convinced he had never spoken to a woman like her.
"You're a lawyer," he said, finally.
Sounding grave, he noticed, and not only because Michael had said something about his law-oriented horizon the last time Lincoln had been at the apartment, to pick up his things –
(A mere excuse to see his brother, maybe – maybe his reason for coming today was an excuse still)
"Yes," the young woman answered. A flash of black lashes as she lowered his eyes to his name tag. "Mister –"
"Lincoln."
A wave of her strange power washed over him as he gave her his name, not with nonchalance, but like in a fairytale where names matter, were names give other people power on the person who reveal it.
He didn't want to hear her speak his family name.
For one delusive moment, Lincoln wanted to be a man without a family, without a past, without wrongs.
"Veronica," she answered, and he felt the symmetrical magic of their formal introduction, found himself wanting to repeat that name, that sounded like such a sweet slice of enigma in her rainwater voice.
Veronica.
In the bus, on his way to his brother's apartment, Lincoln did speak it out loud, the name he had only dared to play in loops within the confines of his mind.
Somehow, it seemed wrong, seemed to draw him closer to that wall of guilt looking to draw him in, to think of her at this moment.
The woman from the restaurant, whom it had been relatively easy to admire – she belonged in a world where Lincoln was only number-one waiter, a good-looking smile on a face that could pass for ruggedly handsome in its way.
Right now, though, standing in that bus crammed too full of people for them to sit, those smiles with Veronica and occasional exchange of witty comments – they felt like a fool's delusion; a wild dream.
John Abruzzi got me in here, among these people, so that I could pretend to like them, to be like them.
But 'pretend' was just the right world.
Lincoln wasn't, in fact, just a fairly good waiter, but an ex-con shamming his way into a new life. His job at the Everest was the wages his criminal work for a potent mobster.
The worst of it was, it had never occurred to Lincoln there'd be cause for confusion. That he might want to forget Lincoln-the-ex-con so he could be Lincoln-the-waiter full time.
Yet again. He hadn't planned for the woman, Veronica, to happen, hadn't expected he'd walk to her table while more or less casual ways to ask her out would play over and over in his mind –
(By the way, if you're not busy tonight – if you're ever tempted by more down-to-earth views – I thought maybe – I just wondered if by any chance you might –)
Whether to pick up a woman or on any other occasion, Lincoln had never stammered before, and didn't intend to go through with any of these sentences until he had mustered them into a coherent whole.
But as the bus stopped and Lincoln got out, and the familiar streets of his brother's neighborhood flashed him by, Lincoln felt sure he would never actually ask that woman out.
Anything we could have would only be founded on a lie.
Either that, or he'd have to tell her, tell her he wasn't only Lincoln-the-ex-con but Lincoln-the-betrayer, the Liar, the Unforgiveable.
A chill passed through Lincoln's frame as he entered his brother's building and started climbing the cold steps. Months, only months, since he'd seen Michael, but it was the longest the two brothers had ever been apart. Even when Lincoln was incarcerated, Michael visited nearly every week, when work allowed it. Lincoln had always felt amused by it – the image of his little brother in such a place as Fox River, with his fancy shirts, his delicate and beautiful face.
The things Michael did for love. The things I took for granted.
What had Lincoln ever done for his brother? What had he ever done for anyone?
Nervousness came and went as Lincoln crushed it out of existence, as he gave a couple of raps on the door.
He had no excuse to be nervous. No one had any excuse to go where they weren't supposed to go then collapse into a pitiable mess, for finding themselves precisely where they had decided.
His composure didn't crack even when Michael swept open the door, and the two brothers faced each other, suddenly –
Yes, it was sudden, after all these months, to see Michael's face, a face he'd known by heart ever since he could remember but that now struck him as a stranger's.
Since the motel room incident, Lincoln had felt the same way whenever he looked into a mirror.
It struck Lincoln he and his brother were like shattered pieces of a same whole, glass fragments that each reflected a broken image, full of cracks and holes.
As if the trauma of Lincoln's betrayal had disunited them from their own identities as well as from each other.
In whatever way each brother had decided to cope – there could be no going back to the way things were. This much was certain.
"Lincoln," Michael said.
No recognizable form of animosity or anger broke free at the word. It used to be easy for Lincoln to read his brother, easier than it had ever been for him to read anything – he might not have been good at guessing what his teachers wanted him to see in a play by Shakespeare, but Lincoln was always able to read right the only thing that mattered.
His little brother.
When he came home from school with a frown, Lincoln would be relentless. What happened, Mikey? Did someone hurt you? Was it the kid that was looking sideways at you last week, the one with the red shirt?
It was that simple. Michael never needed – or meant, Lincoln was sure – to rat on anyone. Lincoln only had to read the answers on his silent face, then go have your typical big brotherly chat with whoever had been picking on him, and that was the end of trouble.
How grown his brother looked, Lincoln thought, and that it had taken him this separation to really see Michael had turned into a grown man, sometime between now and puberty.
"Did you want something?" Michael asked.
A little relief kicked in, a small puff of warmth into Lincoln's chest, that Michael didn't greet him with more outright hostility. Yet at the same time, there seemed nothing more humiliating than his brother's implication –
Did you want something?
As if Lincoln were a parasite that had been pumping himself full of Michael's blood, time and money all his life, crawling away when he was replete, going from one slimy mistake to the next.
Lincoln shook himself up a little, as if to resist the pull of that black wall that wanted to draw him into its immortal embrace.
"Yeah, I wanted to give you this."
He took a rolled stack of bank notes from the pocket of his coat and handed him to it; he ought to have put them in an envelope but had never gone around to buying some. As he held his hand towards his brother, into the slit of the open door, Lincoln felt oddly exposed; as if his hand were committing a transgression, penetrating within forbidden territory, and it stood at risk of catching fire, like a vampire inside a church.
Michael looked at the money with puzzled interest, like he might look at an unknown breed of spider, particularly repulsive, maybe poisonous.
"What is that?"
"Rent I never paid you. A few months of it. I can afford it now, so there'll be more coming."
When Michael looked back at him, his eyes glowed with amusement. Though Michael was still partly concealed behind the door, Lincoln could tell he'd grown thinner, and hadn't shaved in a few months. Because Michael's face never grew hairier than an adolescent's, you might not immediately pick up on it, but Lincoln did.
"Are you trying to make us even, Linc?"
"No." With some shock, like what Michael suggested would have been a criminal offense. "Never."
Michael nodded. Though his face was no longer an open book to Lincoln, he could still identify some of what was happening. It would have been easy for Michael to refuse the money, even if he could probably use it – to toss back his brother's attempts at rebuilding the monumental bridge between them he'd himself destroyed, over years and years of bad decisions.
There was mercy in the way Michael accepted the cash and met his brother's eyes; mercy, not forgiveness. Forgiveness was not even the light at the end of Lincoln's tunnel, but an unlit candle in the rain that little short of a miracle could set alight.
But Lincoln could take mercy. After all he'd done, he wasn't above taking anything.
"Well," Michael said. "I'd invite you in, but that'd be a little weird, I think."
"I'm fine where I am."
Really, Lincoln was glad any part of his brother would take the least enjoyment in seeing him – although he knew the love that bound them probably went beyond all degrees of unforgiveable wrongs and evils.
"Well." Lincoln said in turn. Perhaps he was stalling for time, but if Michael wanted him gone, he would tell him; forwardness had never frightened the brothers. "Did you listen to Bagwell's podcast?"
"'America Now'?" Michael nodded. "Doesn't surprise me. Some Republicans still care about their party remaining decent, but those who follow Bagwell – they're all about war. So, of course, they'd drown her in nonsensical conspiracy theories, so she'd look weak, would have to appear on the defensive, and with all the congressional obstructionism they'll heap on her, it'd be a wonder for her to unbury herself soon enough that she can do something meaningful."
Lincoln was silent for a moment. Michael hadn't spoken Sara's name, and it would be wrong for Lincoln to be the one to say it – he hardly dared to pick up the topic, hot and burning, to be handled with much caution, after Michael left it to float freely between them.
"You don't think…" Lincoln said. "That she can make a difference? I mean –"
"I think she's one of the rare people to have lived in the White House who genuinely cares about helping the helpless, Lincoln. But she's not the only one. There've been others before her. In the end," he shrugged, "one good president isn't always enough to move the country forward. Not when the Senate wants to put you down, and about half of the country would sooner go to war than accept the changes."
"So, that leaves nothing for us to do?"
Michael smiled.
The look of it surprised Lincoln so, it was like a warm punch in his chest, sinking through flesh and bone.
"I didn't say that."
For a flashing second, Lincoln was tempted go glance past his brother's shoulder and try to see if anything special hid behind that ajar door.
"There are other ways," he said, "other places to be than the spotlight. When that's where you are, and you want to make a real change – naturally, you get all the opposition. But that's enough about politics," Michael said, when his brother was going to ask for details. "What about you? How's life treating you, Lincoln?"
Despite the new coldness to his voice, Lincoln identified no cruel irony or disdain. Their relation certainly had changed – but Michael handled it as honestly and with as little anger as possible. Not to forgive someone was one thing, completely different from letting anger eat you up. Lincoln was glad his brother had taken the right course.
Lincoln shrugged. "I work at the Everest now."
"How's that doing for you?"
"Not bad. I make a lot of money. The people I work with are only medium assholes, and some of them aren't assholes at all. Yesterday, I got to meet Shonda Rhimes."
"Well, good for you."
Lincoln sensed as the end got closer, and decided he wanted to put in something more honest before he had to leave – something that might give his brother a real reason to want to see him.
"I'm working on something, too. A project." As Michael didn't prod him for details, Lincoln pursued. "Every night, I find a fancy restaurant isn't a bad place to learn about what very rich people think and do. I get politicians, you know. Not just Hollywood celebrities. I take notes of everything I hear. Thought you might be interested in having a look."
Michael was silent.
Maybe accepting money was easier than to allow his brother into his big scheme, which was still fresh and all his to nurture.
For whatever reason – maybe only his brother's persisting silence – Lincoln heard himself add, "I met a lawyer."
A tremor of remorse went over Lincoln's frame; it took him a lot of effort to keep himself from a visible shudder. Why would he bring Veronica into this, when he didn't even dare talk to her about going on a date?
But the different spheres of Lincoln's life were collapsing together as if the watery barriers between them had never stood a chance to keep them separate.
All the same, Michael seemed nonplussed. "I meet lawyers all the time."
"I mean a lawyer who takes on big clients. Clients who make the national news."
"And you want to introduce us?"
"Well, I don't –" Lincoln stopped himself short. "Eventually."
The wait seemed an eternity as Michael's eyes gauged his brother's face, with that same mercy that bore no resemblance to forgiveness.
"You don't have to do this, Linc." Michael said. "Do all those things, I mean, to make amends."
Lincoln's tone was equally grave. "What else can I do?" He said. "I want to help, Michael. If you're trying to catch some of these guys red-handed, I actually might be able to."
"You trying to do right by me, Linc? Or by your country?"
"Maybe both."
Michael considered this. To start what would amount to a business relation with a brother whose betrayal nearly destroyed you wasn't something you decided on without heavy consideration.
"I hear things," Lincoln said, was aware he sounded like someone desperate pleading for his case. "At the restaurant. There, people don't even pay attention to you. They live in their tiny world, at their table, so much above your paygrade they forget you even speak the same tongue. I hear things," he repeated.
"And you write them down."
Michael waited for a moment. His eyes went over his brother from head to foot. Maybe it was only to admire his uncharacteristically decent clothes. But Lincoln didn't think so. He thought (or maybe hoped) that his brother was getting to know him again. To start afresh with someone, when you've done them that much wrong – it's a lot like trying to befriend a stranger who's got all the right reasons not to trust you, and none to give you a chance.
But please, give me a chance, Michael. I can change. I can be of use.
"The book," Michael said finally. "You have it on you?"
Lincoln couldn't resist a smile, as he grabbed a fold of his jacket to open it wide and discover the notebook that protruded from an inner pocket.
After some few seconds of thought, Michael took a step back and opened the door of his apartment in response.
Behind his shoulder, in the living room, Lincoln's jaw slackened at the sight of the spider web, where his brother had connected the highest-ranking people in Washington.
There was enough mirth left in him that Michael met his brother's smile halfway as he said, "All right then. Let's get started."
...
AN: Again, I'm sorry this took a little longer than usual. 'I've been busy' would be an understatement ;) I'm actually preparing a competitive exam this year and spending A LOT of time on studies. Please let me know your thoughts and reactions! Hope to see you soon with a new update :)
