Author's Notes: So, I've been meaning to go back to this fanfic for a while, but honestly, current U.S. politics kept draining it out of me. I don't have words for the horror I feel at the overturning of Roe v. Wade, or the mass shootings that keep tearing this country apart. This hardly seems like a fun background for fanfiction writing anymore. Every time I open my "Welcome to the Jungle" file, I keep wanting to make this into a completely different story. I want to take back the fact I gave the GOP the benefit of the doubt, that I tried to treat Republicans with nuance and respect when they've just waged war on women's reproductive rights. Politics is not a topic I ever took lightly – but right now, it's gotten more tragically serious than ever to me.
Sorry, this is getting awful long. Here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to keep writing this fanfiction and see where it takes me. I don't want to drop any of the essential plot points I've developed in the past chapters, and even if it verges on science fiction now, I'm going to stay true to the portrayal of Republicans I've developed in this fic, and pretend what's scr*wing up politics right now are mostly (a lot of) bad apples, which I've written here as Bagwell's Knights. I'm not sure whether this is going to turn into a political fairytale or a disillusioned story about being the change you want to see in the world – but I want to find out. Hopefully you do to. Enjoy the chapter.
WARNINGS: to reflect my mood, the chapter is going to contain some swearing.
…
The years had gone easy on Stephen since he'd had Sara on his TV set. His hair was graying, not thinning, and he slipped into his trademark charisma without effort.
"Hello everyone, welcome to a Late Show. I'm your host Stephen Colbert and tonight I have the pleasure of meeting with Michael Scofield – or do you prefer 'the Batman of lawyers'?"
The audience in the room chuckled, and Michael managed to force out a laugh, about two seconds out of tune. "God," he said, because he'd decided to be as honest as he could during the interview. "I wish people didn't call me that."
"It's the hoarse voice, isn't it?" Stephen winced. "A definite mood-killer for me."
"Er – mostly it's the millionaire beating on poor people. I could never buy into that."
Stephen laughed, but didn't push it too far. Michael wiped his palms on his expensive trousers – more expensive than anything he'd gotten used to wearing since he'd left engineering behind.
"Image matters," Bruce had told him, when he was prepping him for the interview. "I know what you're capable of, Michael, but you don't have a degree. You're not a lawyer. People have to think you're respectable, that you know what you're talking about."
"Two-thousand-dollars' worth of suit will do that?"
Bruce sighed. "You know, I can really see why Sara loves you." It took Michael so completely off guard, he didn't think of shirking Bruce's eyes. "After a decade spent in the world of politics, someone who needs to be convinced that appearances matter is like a breath of fresh air."
"Seriously," Michael said. "I'm against this. I'm against wearing something worth so much money, a whole family could live off it for weeks."
"You don't think Sara wears expensive clothing?"
"She's the president."
"And you're becoming a public figure." Bruce shook his head. "I'm sorry, Michael. Staying absolutely true to yourself is a privilege – and if you want to build the right image for yourself, the kind of image people will fall for, you're going to have to surrender that privilege."
Michael chewed on his tongue. "When I'm done with that suit, we can sell it and give the money to charity?"
"If that'll get you into it, absolutely."
Now that Michael thought looked back on it, he hated how much it sounded in bad taste. The whole exchange with Bruce could have been snatched off the back of an Iron Man DVD. Does the man make the suit, or does the suit make the man?
"So," Stephen said, shifting on his chair, his whole demeanor tailored to put Michael at ease. "Why don't you tell us about yourself, Michael? America knows where you're at – a self-taught law expert who takes on the cases of people who can't afford good representation – but how about how you got there? How do you choose your cases?"
"I, er –" Michael cleared his throat. "I don't know. I just – sometimes people reach out to me. Sometimes I hear about a case, something so unfair I'll lose sleep over it. It used to drive me crazy. It still drives me crazy except now – I don't know. I just want to be doing something."
Stephen's eyes bored into him under his bushy brows. "Wow. You know, a lot people just grab a beer out of the fridge and try to chill after a long day's work."
The audience laughed.
"Was there a trigger?"
"A – a trigger?"
"So," Stephen swept the room with his hands, "three years ago, you're an engineer, your whole life's carved out ahead of you. You make a lot of money – right?"
"Right."
"You hear that, you kids at home thinking about what you want to do for a living? It pays to be an engineer. Yet suddenly, you go off the tracks. Quit your job, and start diving into law books." Stephen shrugged, his eyes wild, like he was watching a TV show that left him on the edge of his seat. "What happened?"
Michael licked his lips. "I just couldn't stand being a spectator anymore."
"You had to do something."
"Yeah. Anything."
Stephen nodded. "Nothing pushed you to it? Something you read in the news, something that just tipped the scale?"
"Not that I can think of."
"Okay. Well, Michael, I'm gonna be honest with you, you used to be so careful about keeping your identity secret, I didn't think I'd ever see what that face looked like – let alone have it on my set. And it's a good face, right?"
Some women cheered in the audience. Michael felt like someone had pasted microwaved tomatoes to his cheeks.
"Nothing I'd hide from the cameras," Stephen winked. "But let me tell you, I really didn't expect the first glimpse I'd get of you would be alongside an old Republican lawyer, outside the hospital where they took the president after the Washington Cathedral shooting."
A boulder sank down Michael's throat. Stephen went on, "Could you explain a little what your relationship with Bruce Bennett is?"
That was the one question Michael had actually prepared for. "Bruce took his retirement a few years ago, and since he's been doing his best to help bring justice to those who don't get fair representation. When he heard about me, he wanted to see if I was legit – if I knew my business, if I was really determined to help people. He liked what he saw, and we've been working together ever since."
"Is he some kind of mentor?"
Michael shrugged. "He's a good man. That's enough, isn't it?"
"Right," Stephen laughed. "Well, Michael, I think there's only one question you haven't answered." He pointed a finger at him. "Can you tell this room and all the rest of America, right now – who is your favorite super hero?"
More laughter sprinkled from the audience, but Michael didn't join. A kind of solemnness dropped over him, like someone had just cracked an ice-egg over his head. His eyes moved away from Stephen and toward the camera. His mood must have transpired because, soon, the whole room went quiet.
"Michael?" Stephen said.
Michael stared into the camera, and for the first time tonight, his voice came out steady. He said, "She knows who she is."
…
Jared_20166: Seriously, can't take all this bullsh*it anymore. Someone needs to kick that witch out of the WH before the WHOLE COUNTRY GOES TO HELL. #KnightsOfAmericaUnite #MakeAmericaStrongAgain #IChooseWar
Melissa_Andrews: Jesus the BITCH IS TAKING OUR GUNS FROM US! Where does it stop? Someone stand up. EVERYONE stand up. #IChooseWar
realTheodoreBagwell: Knights all over America, I hear you. I feel you. Someone takes away your constitutional rights, and we just gonna let them? We just gonna hand them over? I sway, let THEM hear us. Let them FEEL us. #IChooseWar #KnightsOfAmericaUnite
…
The heat of July was even worse for the White House than the chill of winter. People smelled of rank sweat beneath their suits. A decanter of iced coffee sat permanent on Sara's desk, and whenever it had fewer than two cups in it, Sara called her assistant and had him fill it up.
Four months, already, since she had signed the People's Bill into law. At the party that took place later in the reception room – Kellerman swore it took him fifteen minutes to shake Sara awake – Henry Pope raised his flute of champagne at her and said, "Congratulations, madam president."
Sara gave a nod in reply. She had already thanked him for his vote – and anyway, thanks could never cover what he had done for her. For this country.
"If you get tired of the Senate in the next six years," she said instead, "there'll be room for you at the White House."
He chuckled. "Another party traitor in your cabinet."
"I know a good politician when I see one."
"Don't flatter me. What I did was bad politics – we both know it. Some might call it political suicide."
Sara feigned surprise, swept the room with her eyes. "Haven't you heard? This is the White House of political suicides. Socialists, idealists, outcasts –"
Kellerman snorted, a few feet behind her. How many drinks had he had?
"I'm serious though," Sara said. "You put the interests of your country's ahead of party. You put your people first. I respect that."
Pope shrugged, but his lips twitched beneath his mustache. He covered it with his glass and took a long swallow. "I'm an old man, you know. Not much fight left in me – but I appreciate the compliment."
Sara stared into her glass, hesitating to press the point. Since Bagwell had so crudely interrupted her on the Senate Floor, the hashtag IChooseWar had been picked up by thousands of Internet users. Though she was so happy she'd passed the People's Bill, part of her was ready to waltz from joy, she wasn't blind or naïve enough to think there wouldn't be backlash.
Already, Republicans were fleeing the ship, rallying behind the Knights' flag – yes, they were coming up with an actual flag. It'd varied a bit over the past few months, but right now the most widespread version was a great eagle, with outspread wings, on an all-white background. In its claws, the Christian cross hung, dripping blood. "The blood of the innocent," as Bagwell told a Fox News reporter, "who'll die because their fathers won't be able to protect them. The blood of the women who'll be raped because their husbands won't have a weapon to keep them safe. For their lives, for their blood – choose war, my brothers. Choose love."
The whole thing flooded Sara's mouth with bile. How could he spin protecting gun lobby interests into a story about protecting the virgin blood of America?
"If Senator Bagwell keeps getting more followers," Sara said, cautious. "I'll need all the good politicians I can get."
"You mean," Pope said, "that you'll need Republicans who can meet you halfway." He chuckled. "It changes the deal, doesn't it? All we know about politics. It's always been about two parties, ripping each other's throats on the battlefield. Throw in a third party? A man who's not afraid of anything, who has no limits – who'd push the country into civil war in the blink of an eye – and what are we to do?"
"We keep fighting," Sara said.
Pope finished his drink and shook his head. "Ask me again when the time comes, madam president."
Now, as summer had kicked in, and Bagwell's face popped up whenever Sara turned on the television, whenever she scrolled through the news on Instagram or Twitter – Sara wondered if the time would come sooner than either she or Pope could have thought.
Knocks drew her out of her paperwork and she looked up. Her coffee decanter was still a third full. The antique clock on the wall read six p.m.
"Come in," she said.
Sara knew how to tell her cabinet members by now from their way of knocking, so she wasn't surprised when Kellerman stepped into the room. What did surprise her was that he'd been in the oval office with her less than an hour ago.
"Did you forget to tell me something at the meeting?" she said.
Then the look on his face hit her – smashed into her, like a rolling train. The air squeezed out of her lungs. Kellerman's face was its usual impassive mask, but rage boiled so thick, so burning hot beneath the surface, her legs willed her to run for her life.
"What is it?"
"I have something to show you," he said.
"Tell me, first."
"Sara –"
"Now."
Kellerman shut the door and strode across the room. In a second, he stood before her, the oak desk a meagre separation from the fire in his blood.
He pulled out his phone from his pocket and turned the screen toward her. A video was playing. A street packed so full you couldn't see the shops, the restaurants, the ground. It made her think of her first concert, when she was seventeen, and her father had agreed to let her go if Bruce took her.
"What am I looking at?"
"Just watch."
The ambient chatter from the video was like a bee buzz too close to the ear. Then a shot fired.
Sara's heart somersaulted. It was like a hand had pulled on a puppet string and her back went so stiff against her chair, she heard a crack.
"This is the street before the Washington Cathedral."
"Yes," Kellerman said.
She didn't add, The day of the shooting. That much was obvious. After it happened, Sara steered clear of all the footage that ran on the Internet, capturing her near-death experience for the whole nation to watch. A thrill of anger coursed through her veins as she looked at Kellerman. "You might have warned me."
He didn't make a bad joke – Did I trigger you? Not just because it would have been in bad taste, and he would be the last person to joke about this with anyone. But because right now, there was no space for anything in him but rage. No tact. No patience. No kindness.
"What is this, Paul?"
"If you just watch –"
"Tell me now."
A strange noise came out of Kellerman's throat. Some kind of growl? He started speaking very fast, "All the footage we had from that day took us no closer to identifying the shooter. See this?" He pointed to a dot on the screen, and didn't wait for Sara to reply. "That's a security camera from a jewelry shop."
"Most cameras in the streets are sham," Sara said, "just there to scare off a thief."
"Well, this one wasn't. And the shooter must have known that. At two fifteen, a minute or so after the shot, he comes walking down this street."
"How do –"
"At the gunshot, everyone rushes toward the cathedral. But he walks away. Walks, doesn't run."
"Wait," Sara's pulse throbbed at her temples. "You're telling me –"
"Just a minute now."
Her hand came down on Paul's shoulder before she could stop herself, until he was facing her. "You caught my shooter on camera, and you didn't tell me? What part of keeping me in the loop isn't clear to you, Paul?"
"There was nothing to say," he shot back. "You have bigger things to worry about than chasing after smoke."
"That's my call to make, not yours."
But the rush of adrenalin that had awakened in her bloodstream hinted it might have been for the best. Since they passed the bill, things had gotten better. Not okay. But better. Sara managed between four and five hours on most nights, and the nightmares started to space out. Her bodyguards no longer rushed into her bedroom because of her screams – at least, not every night. Some people liked to joke about this or that president haunting the White House, but Sara was the first to have made it feel haunted while she was alive.
For the few months of reprieve she'd gotten, part of her was grateful to Kellerman that he'd kept such a tight leash on the information. But there was something else – a raw, rabid throb in her chest, that cried out for blood, and couldn't forgive Kellerman for not giving it something to put its teeth on.
"Sara, I guarantee you, I've been through every second of the security footage ten times. All it teaches us is what we already know. That he's a man, five feet, nine inches, medium built. He's wearing gloves and a cap. All the other cameras in the streets are for show. We tried tracking him to the following street, but it was a bust, okay? The man just vanishes into thin air. Must have had a car waiting."
Sara shook her head. "How sure are you? All you have is a man walking against the grain –"
"In gloves and a cap. He's too careful to hide himself. Anyway, it's our biggest lead."
"But you just said the security footage didn't show anything."
"No, I said it didn't help us identify the man." Kellerman pointed at the screen. "This was taken by a witness who happened to be in the crowd that day. Now, the security footage from the jewelry shop did give us one thing. Not the shooter's face, or anything to identify him with. But it showed us a man in the crowd, holding a cell phone, who seemed to be filming the street when the shooting happened. His phone was facing the shop. So –"
"You thought he might have caught the shooter's face on camera."
"Bingo. It took us weeks to find the right man. Turns out he didn't live in Washington but happened to be in for the weekend. We ran his face through our database and finally got a match on a Californian accountant."
"Well, what took you so long?"
Kellerman smirked. It was so mirthless that goosebumps broke down Sara's arms. "The guy's phone got stolen at the airport that very afternoon. You still think it was just a random guy walking against the grain?"
Like most politicians, Sara didn't believe in coincidences. "Jesus."
"Yeah." Kellerman's index pointed at the screen. "Mercifully, the guy sent this to his girlfriend as the taxi drove him to the airport. Should just be a few seconds now – there."
Kellerman pressed pause on the video.
The throb in Sara's chest revived, like thick bubbles in a witch's cauldron. Her mouth filled with saliva, her nails sinking into her palms.
Her eyes glued to the screen before she could think to prepare herself.
On the video, a Caucasian man in a grey suit strode away from the cathedral. His cheeks dug by a stubble, which was probably as much of a beard as he could grow. Dark hair cropped short beneath an anonymous black cap, he stood straight as an exclamation mark. He looked like any man you would have plucked out of the military some twenty years short of retirement.
"Sara?"
Sara unballed her fists, and realized one of her nails had broken against her palm. "That's the man who shot me," she said, without trying to make it sound like a question.
"It looks like it."
Naturally, the face's man didn't ring a bell in her head. She'd never laid eyes on him before. It went without saying that the shooter would be the arm of the assassination attempt, not the head.
Sara said, "Now, we only have to find out who hired him for it."
…
"Come on, get it moving, people!" Gretchen said. The team had been working without break for the past twenty-eight hours. Officially, they were the Special Washington Cathedral Shooting Investigating Committee. After the president finally signed the People's Bill into law, Kellerman had decided to reinvest his full energy – and Gretchen's – on dissecting the day of the shooting. It felt a lot like beating a plough into soft earth until it decided to yield crops.
"Not that I don't like working alone with you, Morgan," he told her, before letting out one of his trademark sighs. "Who am I kidding, of course I hate it, but that's beside the point."
"You want to bring in experts?" she said.
"Yes."
"Obviously, thousands of professionals are already working on the Washington shooting."
"And we'll make it a few more."
Thus, the Special Washington Cathedral Shooting Investigating Committee was born. Because it was so long to say out loud in a sentence though, pretty soon, they started calling themselves 'TA', which Gretchen found with dismay was short for 'Tancredi's Army'.
"For Christ's sake," she vented, when she and Paul were getting their coffee refill one evening. "This is the White House, not a school for wizardry."
"You know what your problem is, Morgan?" Paul drained his cup of coffee, burning hot, in three seconds and crushed the carton cup into his fist. Gretchen remembered having to stop her jaw for coming undone the first time she saw him do that. "It's that you waste energy caring what kind of fantasy people have to believe in, in order to sacrifice ninety percent of their lives to us. I don't care if they think we're the good guys in a Harry Potter book. I wouldn't care if they pictured the president anointing them Knights of the Round Table."
"What about your fantasy?" Gretchen asked.
Kellerman tossed the crumpled cup in the trash and walked out.
Now that it had all come to fruition though, Gretchen doubted anyone needed fantasies to keep it rolling.
"God, how long does it take to make a phone call?" Gretchen barked. "Chop chop. We want to catch this guy or what?"
The room was so full of people, moving to and fro, it actually looked blurred to the naked eye. One reason why Gretchen would never leave the White House – if even these people seemed slow to her, how could she ever take normal people anymore?
"Do we have secret service on the line?"
"Put the CSA through. Yes, I'll hold."
"Goddamn it, this is an emergency. Do you need me to spell that to you?"
"Where is Kellerman?"
Gretchen's ear perked up at that. She glanced at her phone, ignoring the gazillion messages that popped on her screen. Six p.m., which would be Paul's usual running time. Oh, yes, since they'd passed the bill and created Tancredi's Army, Gretchen's Doritos-eating colleague had apparently disappeared in a pit of oblivion. Paul had started running, forty-five minutes every day, and Gretchen never saw him feed himself anything other than protein bars, coffee, and whatever combination of caffeine and protein powder he kept in his Thermos flask.
"What is it?" she teased him once. "You think you're gonna catch the shooter by running laps?"
But ridiculous or not, it seemed to be working for him. He kept sharp the whole time he was in the White House – approximately twenty hours per day – and though wild horses wouldn't tear the admission from Gretchen, he actually started looking pretty damn good. For a party-traitor middle-aged guy.
"He's notifying the president," someone volunteered – a bespectacled woman, whose name Gretchen hadn't bothered to learned.
"Did he say anything before he left?" Gretchen asked.
Glasses let out a sigh. "He said, and I quote, that we better know down to what the guy eats for breakfast by the time he gets back."
"And what have we got so far?"
The clicks of mouse devices filled the cramped room. "He's on our database for sure," someone said. "But we can't access the results. Classified."
Gretchen shrugged. "Unclassify it."
"We're on it."
Gretchen drummed red-painted nails over the wall. Tancredi's Army. When it was her sitting in the oval office – however many years away that might be – she'd never let her team call itself something so stupid.
…
End Notes: Please share your thoughts in the comment section and leave kudos if you enjoyed the chapter. Take care!
