Michael's mind is molten fire.
Sleeping. Quiet.
Cold, cold, cold.
Like looking into the wrong end of a telescope.
Specks of dust—people?—buzz nervously about him.
Michael.
Michael.
He doesn't listen. Hears nothing but his heart pumping blood through his body.
Then a voice—her voice.
"Michael."
His legs snap upright. Time squeezes into a two-dimension black box. When her voice bristles his soul to life, there is nothing to do but kill.
Yes.
Fire took Michael's body, but it was prison that broke his spirit—and torture, of course.
The man's mouth is the last thing he saw before his reason was put to sleep.
The man who kept him locked in a cage for four years, who became his master, his creator.
"Relax, Michael. It's all going to be all right. You're mine now. You'll see in time it's pointless to resist me. I can make you think you're an angel and jump out this window. I can turn you into a killing machine. Michael," the mouth broke into a grin. "I can make you do anything."
Then he would play that recording—her voice—and Michael would kill.
"First," the man said, "why don't we listen to your wife sing?"
…
"God no," Sara said, when Lincoln thrust the mic into her hands.
It was their first day back from their honeymoon, and Lincoln said a night out was non-negotiable.
The bar chirped with chatter and music. The smell of sweat, booze and roasted peanuts floated about, thick in the summer heat.
Sara didn't even like bars back when she was using.
"It's karaoke night!" Lincoln said, like that was an argument.
Michael squinted at his brother. "Since when do you like karaoke? You can't sing to save your life."
"Not me!" Lincoln shouted. Not so much because he had to shout to make himself heard in the ambient noise, but because drunk-Lincoln always shouted.
Sara repressed the culpable thought. Sometimes it still surprised her to think he and Michael were actually brothers. So different, you could have fished them out of two separate worlds.
Though he was family, she did not really know Lincoln yet.
Though she could only love him, because Michael did, she had not yet learned to like him.
"Karaoke night isn't about us singing!" Lincoln said.
"Of course not," Michael said, deadpan, then breathed into Sara's ear. "I think it's about time we called it a night. When he's had too much to drink, Linc starts acting like he's eighteen."
"Girls sing," Lincoln said, like he was teaching Michael about fundamental survival skills. "Girls love karaoke night! They don't want to at first but then you get them onstage and you can't get them off it! Love it!"
"Uh—I gotta admit I'm not a fan of that logic," Michael squeezed Sara's hand into his. The beer Lincoln had insisted to buy him rested untouched on the counter, amid crumbs of potato chips. "It's getting late."
"Come on!" Lincoln said.
Much to her surprise, Sara laughed. Michael's eyes darted toward her.
"You know what?" she grabbed the mic. "I will sing."
Maybe it was just to shut Lincoln up, or see the look on her husband's face. Maybe she was still drunk on all the sun from Mexico—mostly the lovemaking. They hadn't gone out of the room long enough to get sun-kissed.
A smile snaked onto Michael's face. "What?"
She shoved him in the chest, slid down the stool into the crowded bar area. "Don't think I have it in me?"
"I don't know, Tancredi," he said. And damn it. If she'd known what a tease he'd become after she married him, she would have—well. She would have probably married him right there and then in Fox River, wouldn't she? "The more I get to know you," he said, "the more you surprise me."
Lincoln was nodding his head, not hearing a word. "Sing! Sing! Sing!"
Sara shuffled toward the stage. She could feel Michael's eyes on her, burning. The spotlight hit her and she should be embarrassed. Dozens of eyes on her. The last time she'd sung outside a shower cabin was at her high school choir. Anytime now, she would get cold feet, a blush would creep up her collar and her voice would jam. She'd run out the door.
But she didn't.
She was too happy.
The music started, and Sara pointed a finger at Michael, half-accusatory.
"This one's for you, baby."
…
Her voice was so sweet that Michael's smile sank all the way to his throat.
You're my world, you're every breath I take.
You're my world, you're every move I make.
Other eyes see the stars up in the skies,
But for me, they shine within your eyes…
A faint buzz wrapped the room in a blur. In the months he'd known her, he'd heard her laugh in the private glow of predawn hours. He'd watched her chest rise and fall to the rhythm of sleep, covered by nothing but sweat and wafer-thin sheets.
But he'd never heard her sing.
When Michael was three, his mother had taken Lincoln and him out for ice cream. It was his birthday. His brain had been awake too early, making memories before he was old enough for science to say it could. He remembered the joy as his tongue dipped into pistachio ice cream. Remembered perfectly, every second, fresh and crisp. That first taste of ice cream was a little like a first kiss. Michael closed his eyes and his stomach melted with how good it was. Just like that, ice cream became the promise his mother dangled in front of him when she wanted him to be quiet, became what he asked for on every birthday, became his favorite thing in the whole world until he grew up, and forgot about that perfect moment of sugary bliss.
Michael shuddered, his eyes fixed on his wife, onstage, fingers tracing along the mic. Even more beautiful because she was not even a little afraid.
In the whirl of a second, Sara's voice sent him back to his first love of pistachio ice cream. When everything was easy, and he knew goodness the moment he tasted it.
With your hand, resting in mine,
I feel a power so divine.
You're my world, you are my night and day—
You're my world, you're every prayer I pray.
If our love ceases to be…
Then it's the end of my world,
End of my world—
End of my world… for… me.
…
The pain did not kill Michael, and that in itself seemed a feat in cruelty.
After the man—his creator—saved him from the flames, only to put him in a cell and offer him a job, Michael didn't expect much more from life than a quick release.
"You're going to work for me," the man had said. Not asked but commanded. His eyes glinted in quiet glee.
Michael had tilted his head to the side. With his hands tied behind his back, in a cell where the heat had made him half insane before his captors used force, let alone torture, he was not in a position to negotiate. But if he didn't act the part, what left did he have?
"Depends," he said. "What's the job?"
"Well," the man said. "You and your little team in New York have been quite the troublemakers. A thorn in the side of government."
Michael's stomach sank. He learned to harden against the pain, these past few weeks. Had no choice but to harden when they prodded him with Taser guns, slid razor blades beneath his fingernails, and fire had licked half his skin away. But when he let himself think of the people in that hotel, refurbished as the headquarters for underground operations, he grew soft again.
His people. Alex, Daryl, Giles.
Lincoln.
Sara.
"So," the man smiled. "It's only fair you make up for the problems you've caused."
A laugh ripped out of Michael's throat. "You think I'm going to work for you?"
"I don't think so. I know so."
"Sorry to disappoint. It's a personal rule of mine that I never work for people who lock me in a cell. Gotta draw the line somewhere, right?"
The man chuckled. His clear blue eyes bubbled. "You forget we saved your life, Michael. Without us, you were as good as dead. As done for as a slice of bacon, dumped on a sizzling hot pan."
Michael's teeth grinded, hard. The ropes bit into his wrists as he flexed his muscles. All the people who died on that boat. Prisoners, whistleblowers, people who tried to shed light on the government's doings—and paid the price for it.
"How can I work for you if I don't know what to call you?"
"Ha. I see what you're doing." The man got to his feet. "But this isn't a give-and-take relationship. For the time being, you can call me Poseidon."
"Does that make me Ulysses?"
"If you want. You defied the Gods, and now you're going to reap the consequences. It's better if you understand right now—in this version, Ulysses doesn't go home to his wife and child. There's no happy ending, no Penelope, no clever escape." Poseidon smiled. "There is only the ocean. And I'm the ocean. Yes, Michael?"
Michael held Poseidon's gaze, until his eyes prickled. The ground he knelt on bit into his bones and the muscles in his neck cramped, but he didn't look down.
"I'm a good swimmer," he said.
The door to his cell slammed open and a tremor ran down Michael's back. Three men entered—Michael recognized them, would know them out of a thousand others. Every detail about them was burned into his retina. He knew down to the aftershave they wore, could draw them from memory in midnight-dark.
They were the men who broke the monotony of his confinement with mesmerizing, mind-blowing pain.
"Relax," Poseidon said, as Michael shifted to the back of his cell reflexively. "This isn't going to hurt—not this time. By now, we know we can't torture you into compliance."
"Get off me!"
Michael kicked at the men and toppled over, lying on his back, helpless as a butterfly whose fragile wings sink into a pool of honey.
While they secured him to the ground, Poseidon pulled out his phone. "You're familiar with the work of Ivan Pavlov, Michael? Wonderful how the brain works. You kick a dog day and night while playing Beethoven, and that same dog will bite even the friendliest hand whenever he hears that song."
One of the men's boots kicked into Michael's face as he tried to get up, and his head burst into a tornado of hot nails.
"Well, men are no more sophisticated than dogs," Poseidon said. "It's easy enough, to associate certain sounds with rewards or punishment. But when you want to clear a man's mind, erase him like a chalkboard, and make him go against every instinct in his body—well, it takes something a little stronger than Beethoven. You have to use something he cares about. Aim for the heart."
The men pulled out batons, whose tip crackled blue with electricity. Michael shuddered. A man pressed a damp cloth to his temples.
"What are you going to do to me?"
Poseidon didn't flee Michael's eyes. "I'm going to destroy you. Rather—I'll burn the very soul out of you. Until there's only your body left, and that genius mind of yours. All mine to use."
"Whatever you want. I'll never do it. I'll never—"
"Shh," Poseidon said. "Struggling against the tide only makes you drown faster. You can stop fighting now, Michael. You've fought for so long. Time you rested, no? Time you let go. Empty your mind. Just listen."
Michael spat a mouthful of blood, lumpy with a back molar that tore out at his captor's kick. "I won't listen to you."
"Oh, not to me," Poseidon clicked a button on his phone, and the room came to life with music—God knows how he got hold of it.
The same notes that played in that karaoke bar, when Lincoln pushed a mic into Sara's hand. Maybe someone in the audience was filming.
Michael closed his eyes, as if to brace against what was coming.
The baton grazed his head and he heard the shock before he felt it.
His skull ignited.
And her voice blew into the room.
You're my world, you're every breath I take.
You're my world, you're every move I make.
Other eyes see the stars up in the skies,
But for me, they shine within your eyes…
Michael's brain whirled against the assault of electricity, shooting chaos into his thoughts. Shards of his life with Sara, her body tantalizing on that stage as she sang. Her skin glowing in a tangle of sheets, in Mexico. Strawberry-blond hair curtaining his vision when she straddled him, and her kisses that tasted sweeter than pistachio ice cream.
As the trees reach for the stars above,
So my arms reach out to you for love.
"It's all right," Poseidon said. "I know you, Michael. There's no use in fighting now. You won't kill for me—but you'll kill for her. You better believe that."
If our love ceases to be…
Well it's the end of my world
End of my world
End of my world
For
Me
…
End Notes: Hope someone beside me is weirdly enjoying this twisted fic. Still the darkest thing I ever wrote. The lyrics in the text are from the beautiful song, "You're My World", and I had Anya Taylor Joy's cover in mind.