Part 2: Upside Down
Sara doesn't remember them ripping Michael off her.
Mahone's voice, "Are you okay?"
She should say, Yes, make sure her team doesn't worry. But she stopped caring, sometime while Michael was trying to kill her.
She tumbles to her feet, her palm brushes the floor. If she looks back, she'll see they are still restraining Michael, stopping him from lunging toward her. She'll see those blue eyes like two pieces of summer sky drill coldly into her.
Maybe Michael is dead, and this man with the burned face who smells like her husband is doing her a kindness, escorting her back to him.
"Sara!"
She pays no mind to whoever is calling after her.
Something has snapped inside her, though she hasn't yet measured the full impact of the blow.
Enough.
You've waited long enough.
Sara wanders down the halls, arteries taking her away from the heart—Michael—and she slithers into the first room that can lock. A bathroom. She's in dire need of a shower.
Her pulse throbs at her temples and she doesn't move for a moment, her back flush against the tile wall.
Did she just leave Michael in their bedroom?
The ghost of his smell in her lungs, the unspeakable joy of that ghost, says, Yes. Part of her wants to go back, to run until he's in her arms again.
But she can still feel his fingers around her throat. No ghost, this time. Vivid as her crushed windpipe, as the dent his thumb left in her collarbone.
This was no unhinged attack, no streak of madness.
He was going to kill her.
And that voice inside her says again, Enough.
You've been a good wife, a good sister to your husband's brother, and a good member of the team.
You've waited long enough.
Sara closes her eyes.
She can fall apart now.
...
Lincoln stares at the face of his brother, the face he doesn't recognize, at eyes that don't recognize him.
Michael sits quiet, now that Sara is out of sight. A picture couldn't sit as still as that. The burns that run over his face and down his shirt might have conquered the ink he once used to break out of Fox River. What's left of that man? Lincoln wonders. Put a man away for four years, grind him between the jaws of hell—how can you expect you'll find the same man, and not a new one, molten into whatever shape they burned him into?
Lincoln moves toward his brother though Alex shouts, "Lincoln, wait!"
Daryl's hand bumps against his shoulder.
"Michael," Lincoln kneels by the spot where his brother sits on the bed.
The same dead eyes, two sapphires, glide over him. Lincoln wraps an arm around Michael's back, clamps him in an embrace that feels forced and so one-sided, he beats a hasty retreat. Gooseflesh breaks all over Lincoln's skin. For a second there, it was like holding his brother's corpse. A dead heart in a living body.
"I, uh—" Alex says. "I'll go check on Sara."
Lincoln brushes away the remark. It stings, punctures through the dreamlike fabric of seeing his brother again. Sara has no business in all this. Lincoln can't think right now of how ridiculous that sounds. That she's his brother's wife, that she just sold her body to a man she hates so that Lincoln can have this moment, can kneel at his brother's side.
Sara can't exist right now, because if she did, Lincoln would have to acknowledge that Michael just tried to kill her. And that fact is like a pebble thrown into the wheels of logic.
Right and wrong crumble under Lincoln's feet.
An hour ago, he would have jumped in front of a moving train to save Sara, would have driven back to Washington even while his brother waited for him here in New York, just so he could beat Kellerman's face to a pulp before Sara's eyes. He owed her that. She was his family, his moral compass. In the past four years, she was the only woman in his life, and all the ways he knew how to love a woman somehow compiled into this chaste more-than-friendship.
Now, her existence upsets him, upsets the way that Michael suddenly fills up his whole world, every inch of space in his heart. If Michael tells him there's a perfectly sound explanation why he just tried to kill his wife, Lincoln will listen. He'll not only listen but believe him, believe madness, throw Sara to the wolves so long as he can have his brother back.
Sara's voice crawls into his brain.
I would have let the whole Senate fuck me, I would have pried him out from the jaws of hell.
If you'd had to rip the skin off your body, I would have handed you the knife.
The thought sobers him like nothing else would have. Lincoln doesn't glance above his shoulder to see Alex leave, to tell him to look after Sara.
He's going to get his brother running right again. For himself and her.
"Hey," Lincoln grips his brother by the shoulders, shakes him. "What the fuck, Michael? What the fuck was that?"
Michael sits, unresponsive, without meeting Lincoln's eyes.
"That was your wife here, you idiot. You fucking brilliant idiot. You know what she did to get you back? Jesus, Michael, look at me. It's me."
"I don't think shaking him's doing any good," Daryl says, but fuck Daryl.
"Ahem," Giles clears his throat. Lincoln knows him even without turning around, because Giles manages to clear his throat with a British accent. "Perhaps we should attempt a different approach."
"You got something in mind?"
"I mean, we might consider acting with caution."
Lincoln snaps back toward Giles. His eyes are veiled with sadness, his gray hair grayer than ever. "Seeing the state Michael is in," Giles says, "I think we should at least take into account the possibility that he did not send us the messages that led to his rescue."
The room falls silent.
Lincoln is aware of his brother's shoulders in his hand, the weight and warmth of him. His skin prickles under Michael's dead stare.
"And if he didn't," Giles says, "the question becomes, who did? And why now? Was it to help Michael or—"
Daryl cuts in, "Or did they send him back to destroy us?"
...
Five Years Ago
"I, uh—gosh is this thing on?" Michael tapped the microphone, eliciting a riot of groans from the crowd. "Sorry. So, yeah. A speech."
His eyes darted toward Sara, who could do little but sip her ginger ale. Why was it anyway that people asked so much of the bride and groom on their wedding day? They'd walked through all the steps, including Lincoln filling in for Sara's father and giving her away.
When she said, "Do we have to?"
Lincoln had shrugged. "It'd be any other couple, I'd say no. But you guys are only going to do this once."
Sara laughed. "No, 'Hurt my brother and I'll break your arm'?"
"Nah, that's for outsiders. People who didn't risk their lives ten times over for us. You're family."
Michael cleared his throat awkwardly.
"So, uh," he said, "that's the moment where I tell you how I met Sara. All couples have this, nowadays, a uh—a 'meet cute'?"
Sara closed her eyes. Secondhand embarrassment. Odds said, if a man could mastermind a prison break and carry seven other inmates through nothing but his own wits and charisma, then he could deliver a decent speech at his own wedding.
Odds were wrong.
"Right." Michael cleared his throat again, right into the mic, and more groans rode down the guests. "Well, I read about this recently and it turns out Sara and I do have a meet cute."
"Oh God," Sara let out.
Lincoln chuckled, took a swig of beer while his other hand was busy holding his phone up to the stage. "This is gonna be good."
"Are you filming this?"
"Shhh. It's every big brother's right to secure humiliating footage of his sibling on their wedding day."
Sara rolled her eyes.
Michael went on. "Actually, I don't think I made the best first impression. That's usually part of the meet cute. Except you want to, I don't know, bump into her and splash coffee on her or something. My bad impression included getting free insulin shots. And severed toes."
It didn't cross Sara's mind to laugh out of sympathy until Michael had paused for over five seconds, way too long for her to fake it.
A bead of sweat rolled down the vein across Michael's temple.
"So, uh, I'd say the real meet cute was—"
His eyes found Sara's among the audience, and he fell silent. Heat communicated between them. This morning flashed through her mind, how they had gotten up late because they didn't sleep much, now that they could occupy themselves during the night with making love instead of running from bullets. How his fingers had run up her thighs to stop her when she tried to get up.
"Do you have to go?" he'd asked.
"Depends. Do you want to marry me in that," she waved at the red dress that hung from their bedroom door, "or naked, with my hair unwashed and no makeup?"
"I choose naked and no makeup."
She kissed him. "We'll have the rest of our lives for that."
He had locked eyes with her then, as he would later at the wedding, in the middle of his speech. "We could have a thousand lifetimes, Sara," he said. So close she could taste his breath on her face, and he tasted like her, his body already as familiar as one of her own limbs. "It wouldn't be enough."
Sara tried to break the spell, knew he was getting lost in this morning as well. Only he was on a stage, with everyone they knew staring at him.
A smile broke open his lips.
The smile that had melted through flesh, reason and heart at Fox River.
"Sorry, folks," he said, and put down the mic. "I thought I could finish that speech, but something just came up. Something really important." He smiled. "I've got to dance with my beautiful wife."
...
Present Day
Sara looks perfectly composed when Mahone sits next to her, on the tile floor of the bathroom. Then again, she looked composed five years ago, when he was holding a gun to her head. There's no way to tell with Sara. He's never seen her lose it, except once.
The sound of her screams ripple through his body, when the ship exploded with Michael inside.
How she thrashed against him until he let go and threw herself inside the water, toward that whirlpool of fire and salt.
"Hey," he says.
Sara doesn't answer, stares intently at her toes. Her clothes lie in a heap under the sink. The room is still steamy from her shower, her skin a notch too red under her bathrobe. You might not expect her to be shy around people she shared a house with for the past four years. That's what you get when you decide to locate your headquarters in a decrepit hotel, and you run into each other in the halls at three in the morning to use the toilet. It seemed like the perfect place to run an underground operation. Lincoln put in the money from his exoneration, Sara tapped in her father's inheritance, and Alex used what little he had left from his divorce.
All that seemed to say one thing, to all of them.
This is your home now. These people are the last thing you have to call family.
"He wasn't like this when we found him," Alex says. "I mean, he didn't attack anyone. Unresponsive, but—I would have said something, done something, if I thought this could happen. He can't have wanted to hurt you."
He stops talking, because this is doing nothing for Sara. He remembers the hard look in Michael's eyes, and she can probably still feel the strength of his grip. He wanted to hurt her all right. Somehow.
Sara brushes a damp lock from her cheek, and Alex's heart halts. Protruding from the collar of her bathrobe, at the base of her neck, a dark bruise gleams like rubies. Did Michael do this? No. Bruises take longer than that to form. With horror, Alex realizes it's a bite mark.
What the hell happened in Washington?
"Sara–"
"I really appreciate your checking on me. But I'd like to be alone now."
Alex sucks in a breath, tries to hold back the flow of words that press against his lips. Where would he start? Four years living alongside Sara, you'd think he knows the woman. And in ways, he does. He knows she takes her coffee black, no milk, no sugar. He knows she hates Christmas songs so much she'll walk out of a store if one starts playing, because Christmases to her are absence—her father's absence, her mother's absence, and she never had time to celebrate them with Michael.
But does he know Sara?
Understand her?
When they drove back from their last mission with Michael and told Lincoln what happened, Lincoln turned into a tornado, started punching everything he could reach. There's still some holes in the walls of the lobby that bear testimony to it. But Sara just stood there, like an ice statue.
"That's a bit creepy," Daryl told Mahone, when Sara got back into their bedroom, and they didn't hear one sob escape from it.
"Don't you ever say something like that when she's around," Alex warned.
But deep down, he agreed with the diagnosis.
It was creepy, for a woman to scream herself hoarse after her husband's death—so uncontrollable it flashed through his mind they might need to check her into a hospital. And then to become perfectly calm. Never collapse. Like the eye of a storm.
Is she past that now?
Does she collapse?
"Sara," he says.
"Alex."
"We're going to get Michael back the way he was."
Sara's lips twitch upward, her gaze still fixed on her toes. "I don't think any of us are ever going back to who we were."
...
Please share your thoughts in the comment section :) Happy new year!