WARNINGS: Swearing. (Probably inaccurate) mentions of mental illness.
…
Sara Tancredi never liked riddles.
Now, problems are a whole other matter: give her signs, symptoms, logical chains of events, and she'll diagnose you before you've had time to say abracadabra. It was a running joke about her during her internship, because she was the fastest to know what was wrong with a patient. Back then, it was easy. The answer was usually right there on the patient's face. Rashes, nervous sweating, sallow complexion.
Maybe it was because treating people who were externally ill was too easy that Sara decided to specialize in helping the clinically insane. Really, the symptoms translated just as clearly through body language, the patients' running talk or obsessions smearing you with all the right clues to figure out what made them tick.
Not exactly like solving a math problem, but a far cry from those silly riddles Sara's colleagues sometimes teased her with (The more you take, the more you leave behind. What am I?) No thanks. If Sara wanted a headache, she'd bang her own head against the wall just like the inmates.
Not that that was an accurate portrayal of what things were like at Saint Abram's. Asylums suffered such distortions in the media, you just couldn't know what they looked like when you'd never stepped foot inside. For starters, the patients didn't actually beat their heads against the wall, that was second-degree talk. (Sara was capable of humor, no matter what her old classmates might tell you). It wasn't awful like you'd expect, it wasn't uncanny either. No patients leering at you with bloodcurdling smiles, no empty corridors at night filled with the sound of thunder and insane laughter. Really, Saint Abram's looked like a regular hospital.
In this unexciting everyday atmosphere, in this world of sheer logical problems, Michael Scofield was the one exception, the enigma that frustrated Sara's need for order.
Of course, he wasn't more difficult than most patients. Every morning, Michael took his meds without putting on a struggle (or so the staff thought), and during his appointments with Sara he was always polite, which was a rare quality around these parts.
What puzzled her about him wasn't even really his condition. Psychologists had concluded Michael suffered from acute monomania, which developed after the death of his brother a couple of years ago. Around that time, Michael's behavior changed. At work, he became aloof, unfocused. Most of his colleagues took this to be a normal sign of mourning, but then, he started showing up late, disappearing for entire days without being able to explain himself.
After a year and a half during which Michael lost his job and became estranged from all of his close friends, he was taken in, having suffered an extremely severe episode in the middle of the street. Witnesses called the police, an ambulance (someone even called the fire department). The young man was raving like a demon, they said, chasing a vehicle. He described it as a black sedan, though no other bystander could verify its existence. Michael shouted for people to stop the car, They're going to kill him, they're going to kill him!
Now, it was difficult for Sara to imagine calm and meditative Michael in such a state, but witnesses said he had been a live wire that day.
"The man just lost it," was the diagnosis most of his close relations came to.
When Michael gave his version of the facts to the police, then psychiatrists, he claimed his brother, Lincoln, was alive and well. For the past year and a half, he'd been living in some secret location amidst a group of people whose identity he couldn't reveal, and Michael had been helping him, helping them, trying to bring down an evil corporation affiliated with the government and which Michael clearly believed to be omnipotent.
'My brother worked for them at first,' Sara had read in Michael's report. 'He's been involved with criminals most of his life. But when he realized more money meant larger scales—that it meant murder—he wanted out. But they wouldn't let him out. So he faked his death.'
Significantly, Michael admitted he didn't immediately know about this. For a few days, Michael actually believed his brother was dead. It was only later that Lincoln allegedly contacted him and explained the situation.
Michael's file stipulated the brothers had been very close. It wasn't unthinkable Lincoln's death would traumatize Michael to the extent that he'd invent a new reality. His rant about the evil entities that had entered his life ever since was remarkably detailed. No confusion, no variation or mistakes concerning their identities. Unlike most patients suffering from such a condition, he didn't give vague descriptions of an indistinguishable mass of 'men in black'. He could give a minute account of some of the faces he believed he had gotten a close look at.
One man in particular haunted his mind.
Six two, a hundred and sixty pounds. White. Military haircut, receding hairline. Blue eyes mostly covered by Ray Bans.
Aside from the surprising amount of details, it was your regular conspiracy theory.
Michael lived in a persecuting universe where not only he but his brother were in mortal danger, because the evil corporation—he called it the company—now knew him to be alive.
But the real riddle about Michael Scofield didn't lie in his story so much as his character. When Sara talked to him, prodded him to open up about his imagined world, part of her couldn't adhere to the thought that he suffered from mental illness.
Sara had worked with mentally ill people for a few years now, enough to always be able to get that click in her brain when the pieces of the puzzle came together.
Michael Scofield never came together in a coherent picture.
In his furtive way of refusing to fit in the mold, he was more like a riddle or a magic trick. Now you see me now you don't.
But he had been an inmate for two months now and in recent weeks, his mental health had clearly improved. He had stopped talking about his fantasies altogether and even admitted the possibility that they were a fiction.
Yet part of Sara wasn't convinced he believed it.
Anyway, that was before life as she knew it unraveled at the seams.
And—as fortune had it—it was all because of Michael Scofield.
…
END NOTES: Recently, I've gone over this first chapter and couldn't help editing it to improve the prose and plot. That's why I've deleted the future chapters (they'll be coming back much improved and, hopefully, I'll get to the bottom of this fic and all the others!). My writing isn't the only thing that's evolved since I first posted this fic—I think I was twenty-two, so, basically a baby. Obviously, "asylums" aren't a thing anymore. I'm aware you don't need to escape from one—rather, you need to wait for a long-ass time in order to get a spot in a mental facility.
So this is me taking full responsibility for not taking reality into account in this story.
This is a fanfiction. It has a fanfictiony asylum. Rereading this, Michael's "monomania" sounds more to me like schizophrenia, but I know nothing about psychology (despite having two sisters in the field and I will die from shame if they come upon this fic).
I also did not update all the talk about "insanity" here—this fic is no doubt RAMPANT with political incorrectness. It was 2018. I've been on the fandom a long time (before I was actually an adult) and there's so many things in there that would make me cringe or widen my eyes or wake up in the middle of the night going, "Jesus Christ, I can't have written this." If I wanted to go over ALL my fanfics and update them to my current social awareness, I would have to work on it full time for a year. (I believe my total fanfic word count is SOMEWHERE near a million words). Seeing as that's impossible (shockingly, no one will pay me for revising my own fanfictions), I have to decide between deleting it all and letting it stand as it is. That's what I've decided to do—mostly. Sometimes I find I can't resist going back and editing.
Anyways, sorry for this very long note.
That's my disclaimer: suspend your disbelief for the asylum side of the story if you wanna read it. If you can't, that's cool, catch you later, keep being awesome. Share your thoughts in the comment section (writing's a lonely business). Take care! xoxoxo