Chapter Text
The one thing he never planned about Fox River was to get used to it. Lights in, lights out, wash and eat and exercise every day at exactly the same time.
“Whole damn place makes a machine out of you,” Westmorland told Michael on his first week here.
But the truth is that Michael likes machines.
There is an undeniable appeal to this. Following a routine with clockwork precision, the dull gray choreography of keeping in line, eyes on the ground, not drawing attention either from other cons or from the guards.
“Keep your head low, you should be a’right.”
That’s what Michael has tried to do his entire life.
Today, something is different. His body picks up on it the second he wakes up, like staring into the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
Alert, Michael scans the cell for potential danger. But there’s no one there, only the squeaks from the top bunk when his cellie tosses and turns.
Michael breathes in, breathes out, and understands what’s wrong as the smell burrows into his lungs.
It smells of pine needles. Of home, of winter, of failing to beat Lincoln to the ground floor as they raced down the stairs.
“Merry Christmas.”
Michael leaps to his feet. He’s not used to being surprised, not here, not in Fox River, where everything goes down as planned, where every square millimeter is familiar.
His cellmate chuckles on the top bunk. It’s too dark for Michael to see his face.
Already, his body is relaxing again, relaxing in a way that it never did outside a prison cell. Strange how one gets used to it. A six-by-eight chunk of floor and walls and bars, where no one can come in or out. The safest, most beautiful thing in the world.
He hates himself for thinking that, no, for feeling that, as though it’s a statement on who he is deep down. Scrub away his college degrees, his will to do the right thing and protect the people he loves, and he’s just an animal. One who finds comfort in being stripped from freedom and basic rights, so long as it’ll serve him a life free from surprises.
“It can’t be Christmas,” Michael lets out. “Lincoln’s execution is in April. It’s too early—”
“It’s too late, my friend.”
Michael stays on his guard, even though he has the advantage, even though he is standing and the other man is lying down.
That’s not Sucre’s voice.
“Your brother fried in that chair years and years ago. It’s not your first winter in Fox River. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.”
Michael opens his mouth, to say something, or maybe scream—Lincoln, Lincoln—but he lets it fall back shut, instead. Because he does remember.
In prison, you never forget winter. The ice settling in, deep as bone marrow, deep as nothing except God is supposed to go. Michael remembers flexing and unflexing his hands to keep them warm, wrapping himself in blankets peppered with cigarette holes, leaving the shower running to heat up the cell where freezing drafts could whisper in at will from the cracks in the wall.
“No,” he lets out.
But there’s no point. Michael has been in prison for years by now.
Though his brain won’t register the fact, his body hasn’t forgotten.
A sigh from the bunk bed. “Don’t worry. You’ll get over it.”
Michael doesn’t panic although he should, although the thought of his brother being executed pours acid down his throat. He accepts the facts without resistance. Lincoln, gone. His freedom, his life, his dreams for the future. All gone.
His back is to the wall now, and he doesn’t feel himself sink until he hits the floor, his hands wrapped around his head in the posture he used to adopt as a child to cut himself away from the world.
Even then, all you wanted was a prison cell. No sensory overload. No one but you. You didn’t know you wanted it. But you did. You still do.
He waits for the grief to swallow him, the loss of his brother, crippling, more than he can endure.
But he can’t feel any of it.
Images fill his head instead, gift wraps smoking in the fireplace, looking for an “M” or an “L” on the presents to know who should open what, a plate full of cheap cookies that don’t have a smell and taste like baked sheets of sugar. But the brothers will still eat them all, because it’s Christmas, because they’re there, because why not?
How am I not losing my mind?
But the loss of his brother doesn’t unleash a river of grief inside.
Stupidly, he lets out, “I didn’t have time to buy any presents.”
Then it hits him, there’s no one to buy presents for, and even that doesn’t depress him as much as it should.
“Don’t beat yourself up.”
The man on the top bed is still a shape of shadows.
Michael knows his voice intimately and yet, the wires don’t cross, he can’t connect it to anyone he knows.
As all the important thoughts he should hold on to glide through his fingers, Michael bounces back on the most meaningless things. Christmas. Gifts.
“Sara,” he says.
“What’s that, my friend?”
“Sara Tancredi. I should get something for her. She still works here, right?”
The man on the top bunk just laughs.
Michael’s mind works, trying to remember the last time he saw the prison doctor. The thought of her fills up the cell like a thousand suns. Her face, her smile, the summer-fruits smell of her hair. Wait, I know what her hair smells like?
Maybe he caught a whiff of it one day when she was giving him a shot. That he remembers it is wrong in so many ways, but what’s a man to do? His subconscious has no trouble recreating it, in fact, recreating her, from the unique red of her hair to her face and body—
Surely I haven’t looked at her body that close.
So why does his brain feed him sights of ironed sheets, a comet trail of beauty spots along a hipbone, a shoulder marred with a snake-shaped scar?
Maybe another flower. Origami, of course. He can get her that for Christmas. It would feel nice to have someone to give something to. It’s weird, because a voice in him says he already got Sara a present—a vague memory hovers, of a jewelry store—but how would he have walked into a jewelry store when he’s been in prison? Besides, jewelry would be way out of line. He’s never even taken Sara on a date before.
Wait, a date? That took a turn. Michael would never date this woman after studying her life without her knowledge, after making her part of his plan. It’d be wrong on a whole other level. Recipe for disaster. Someday he’d have to tell her the truth and she would hate him, throw things at him, scream that he’s stolen her life, that he’s a monster, how could he lie to her again after all they’ve been through, how could he leave her to raise their son alone?
We don’t have a son, Michael thinks, but only says, “Not another flower.”
He considers for a while. What about a house? A house all made of paper. That’d be a challenge. Flowers are gifts fit for infatuated people, good enough in the early days, when Sara was just a blotch of red in his colorless landscape. A house means family. A house means bricks and mortar, it means strength, it means home, it means forever.
Parasites prickle at his consciousness. He sees Sara in a hospital bed, exhausted, make-up free, more beautiful than a woman who’s been in labor for the past thirteen hours has any right to be.
He sees the child, the size of her forearm, and he seems atom-small and big as the universe all rolled into one.
And somehow he sees them both through frosted glass, like he’s peeking from the outside. Just a creep spying through windows, a spook, a ghost, a shadow.
“That’s what you are, my friend. Don’t you remember? You took the shadows so they could have the light.”
That sounds both distant and familiar, like a poem teachers at school makes you learn by heart.
“I took the shadows,” Michael echoes.
And though it can’t be true, though he doesn’t remember a life out of Fox River—
This safe predictable hell, home sweet home, what more can a man ask for?
—Michael sees Sara and the child again, this time through a living room window. The child sits on the floor, assembling puzzles designed for kids twice as old as he is. From where he stands, the Christmas tree glows with candy-colored balls and tinsels, gold and ruby and sapphire. Piles of gift-wrap lie under the tree, not crumpled into balls or torn to shreds, but neatly folded with the tape carefully peeled off, so they can be used again.
I used to do that, Michael thinks, and beams with a strange pride. He didn’t teach his child to do it, but he passed it on, anyway, and that feels good, so good that he laughs. Drunk on this moment of pure delight, he feels like he could stroll right into the house. He wouldn’t knock, because he wouldn’t need to, he’s Michael, he’s Dad. Waltz in, lift the boy from the ground, make him spin so fast that they would both get dizzy and laugh, and by the time Sara returned from the kitchen with their egg nogs they would be collapsed laughing amidst the freshly unpacked boxes of puzzles and Legos.
But Michael doesn’t do that.
The shadows, he thinks, the shadows, but it’s so hard to keep that mantra in mind when he’s looking at the light.
“Wait,” Michael says, the cold concrete wall from his cell in Fox River biting his back. “I don’t have a child with Sara.”
On the top bunk, the man in the shadow smiles. Maybe because he reads the thoughts in Michael’s mind. A boat cabin, a warehouse in Los Angeles, Sara’s weight above him as she bends to kiss him, and her hair cuts them both into a separate world. It’s red and it’s theirs and it smells like summer, and it’s the world Michael has been trying to disappear in ever since he can remember.
He knows they’re making love but also something different, different from anything else he has done, something that goes beyond pleasure and joy, a sword like pure diamond that stabs into him and ignites his flesh, his bones, his blood.
And he thinks, Yes, that’s what it all comes down to, that sword is really a key, that key is unlocking a door inside him which he didn’t know existed, but the world on the other side is bright and magic, it swells like a promise and it tastes like music.
She breathes into his ear, I love you, I love you, and he knows that he would burn the world if she asked him to, that he would split the seas and rip mountains and ride the wind, there is nothing he couldn’t do, nothing he wouldn’t do, nothing—
“Are you for real?” Sara says, walking to the mailbox while holding the phone. With one hand, she picks up the mail, browses through ads. Her hair is tied in a messy bun, her body wrapped in a blanket which somehow looks as though it’s been designed for models to parade in before dazzled audiences.
“No,” she says. Eyes on the mail, which she divides into two piles before tossing one into the recycling bin. “No, no. We’ve been over this, you can’t keep doing that to him.”
She sighs.
Her breath creates a wreath of steam in the air and a desire pulses through him, to grab it, to hold it close, to keep it in his hand forever.
Houses are forever, houses are bricks and stones.
Hiding from a distance, always from a distance, Sara feels to him as glowing and unreachable as a piece of the moon. The memory of them making love in that boat cabin feels unreal, like he could never have really touched her. Touching her is forbidden—you must take the shadows—and if he gave in she would crumble in his hands like salt.
Michael keeps his eyes open, refuses to blink and miss one moment of this unexpected gift. To see her through a window would have been enough, but her voice, her voice, this sliver of everyday life by the mailbox, maybe because she doesn’t want to have this conversation where their son can hear.
These are the things he lives for.
Pieces of her, stolen, treasured, gone. To sweep the air with his fingers and trace the ghost of her breath still visible from the cold. Maybe he will make out tinges of her summer fruits smell, and maybe it’s only his memory putting it there. But it feels real, as real as the wind that seeps through his coat, so real he wonders what more any man could want.
Did he really make love to Sara once, the amber shine of her body on top of his?
Is it possible when heaven would be merely to breathe her in, to lie in her shadow, to touch something she was touching just minutes ago.
Michael feels jealous of the mail she just threw away, jealous of the vendors from the small coffeeshop downtown she sometimes visits, jealous of everyone and everything that crosses her path and doesn’t even notice.
“Linc, come on. I know things haven’t been easy. But you can’t keep doing this to him.”
Lincoln’s name throws him off, somewhat. It’s too much to think his brother is on the other end of the line, that they’re both just part of each other’s life, when he would trade a vital organ for only one minute of conversation with either of them.
“You’re his uncle. He needs you.”
Her lips press tight together. She won’t go further, won’t say, I need you, although Lincoln can probably read between the lines.
“Well, how am I supposed to explain that to a three-year-old?”
Anger spikes her tone. It’d be so easy for her to be manipulative, to play on those always-sensitive strings, those wounds that won’t heal. What would your brother think if he could hear you? Is that what you call being there for your family?
But she just says, “Fine. Do what you want. But next year, maybe try something better than ‘Something came up’. Better yet, don’t promise your nephew he’ll be seeing you when he won’t. Don’t—” She stops, collects herself. He can practically see her smoothing her anger away with practiced restraint. “Just don’t. Merry Christmas, Lincoln.”
She hangs up the phone, looks absently at the rest of the mail and, after a moment, tosses it into the trash as well.
Michael watches her go back into the house. Part of him is full of anger and hate, because how can his brother be doing this, how can he not know how lucky he is that he can be with his family, with their family, but he’s just throwing it away instead?
The door of the house swings open then shut. Michael closes his eyes.
“Merry Christmas,” he says.
And when his eyes open, he’s back in his cell, and the man on the top bed is sitting up, holding his gaze.
Jacob.
Michael gets back to his feet, fully alert.
“What a sad little picture,” Jacob says. “You put yourself through hell to save your brother, and he doesn’t even have the decency to be there for your wife and kid. Ever think maybe he wasn’t worth all the trouble? Don’t worry. I’ll fill in for him. Hell. I’ll fill in for you.”
Michael’s nails bite into the walls behind him. Though it makes no sense, he can feel the cut, as though by now he and the prison walls have become one.
The cracks on the concrete are really scars, letting winter in.
And they bleed.
Somehow.
Long rivers of red silently streaming.
They just bleed, and bleed.
Jacob jumps down from the bed, takes a step forward. In this cramped up space, Michael feels the move vividly.
“What do you think, my friend? Should we get her a replacement? One brand new husband for Christmas, a father for your kid. Doesn’t that sound nice? Don’t you want them to have nice things?”
Michael’s fingers dig into the concrete walls, the mutilated canvas of his skin. Tattoos, maps, blueprints supposed to chart a path forward so he can find his way home.
To them.
To himself.
I’m in pieces, he thinks. And so are they.
But they can love one another back to wholeness, surely, someday.
And if they can’t, Michael will love their broken pieces more than he will ever love anything whole and unscathed.
Jacob laughs, as though he can pluck the thoughts from his head.
“That ship has sailed, my friend. Don’t you realize that? They’re my family now. You’re just—extra weight.”
Jacob drums the wall with his fingers. A wedding band catches the winter light.
Thunder courses through Michael’s hand. He’s not a violent man, but he feels the need to hit, to hurt, all the way to his shoulder.
Jacob goes on looking at him with that grin. “Go ahead. Just do it. Your son, your wife and I, we’ve had so many Christmases. You think you can do better?”
That laughter again. Michael thinks of Jacob, making Sara laugh, and he wants to not be sane, he wants to fall off the train of reality and drop into madness if that’s where the train’s going.
“Why don’t you try it? Why don’t you give it your best shot, my friend? In the end, you’ll just let them down. You’re too damaged. You’ve spent way too long focusing on breaking out of places, on escaping, on running for your life. You won’t know how to stay. You won’t know how to build a house now without fixating on how you’ll tear it apart, the cracks that’ll allow you to slip away. You don’t have the spine. You don’t have the—”
Michael shoots forward, hand spread wide to latch around Jacob’s throat.
“Die,” he grinds out. “Just fucking die. Just—”
“Jesus, Michael!”
Michael blinks. Sweat trickles down his forehead in spite of the cold. For a second, he is still in Fox River, feral with the impulse to kill the man who stole his life.
The drum of his heart quiets down, slowly, and his surroundings settle in. Lincoln’s place, the spare bedroom where he was going to lie down for a bit because, “Man, you look like shit.”
Lincoln.
His brother stares at him with eyes like shirt buttons, both palms up. Michael lets his hand fall back along his side. Did he touch Lincoln? Punch him? Try to strangle him? The horrifying part is that he doesn’t know.
The thoughts in Lincoln’s mind might as well print themselves on his forehead. That he needs help, he’s out of control, and Jesus Christ did he strangle his own brother?
What if it had been Sara who came to wake him up? Michael’s hands clutch the sheets. What if it’d been his son?
“Sorry,” he manages.
The look on Lincoln’s face doesn’t relax, but some of his perennial casualness makes it to his voice as he answers, “T’s all right.”
They don’t speak for a while.
Lincoln clears his throat, adjusts his shirt collar. “So, um. Sara said to wake you up. We’re all downstairs, cooking, she thought you should be a part of it.”
Michael wants to laugh. Be a part of it. Years ago, when he caught that glimpse of Christmas day in Sara’s backyard, her walking to the mailbox and MJ with his puzzles on the living room floor.
He would have killed to be a part of it.
His throat goes dry.
“Right,” he says.
The idea of joining them all, wrapping presents, sprinkling chocolate chips into cookie dough. Ridiculous. Wrong. It jogs the wheels of Michael’s mind.
Whole damn place makes a machine of you.
“I’ll be right down.”
It doesn’t look like Lincoln buys that, but he can read the room. “Okay,” he says.
When the door closes behind him, Michael doesn’t move. A waft snuck in while the door was open, smelling of chocolate milk, of vanilla cakes and maple sugar.
The words that have looped around his mind for the past two months come riding in.
I can’t be here.
Too damaged. Too far gone.
Too much of him is still in that cell, that cell that felt so much like home, so much more like home than home will ever feel.
Michael feels how dry his mouth is when he swallows. A glass of water sits on his bedside table and he chugs it down, vaguely remembers Sara putting there before he dozed off.
How long is he going to let them do this? Let her play the good doctor and wait for him to be able to—what? Be the man she loves? The man she married, the man who gave her a son. A man she can rely on to not strangle people in his sleep.
He lets go of the glass before he can break it.
This has to stop. He can’t keep doing this. Hurting them, drawing them all into the prison that is really himself, the walls that keep bleeding and where there is no more ink to write a road back home.
You’re just extra weight.
That winter when Michael caught a sliver of Sara’s life, the rainbow colors of the Christmas tree, he would have given anything to be with them. Anything instead of being on the outside, looking in.
But now he knows this is worse. To carry them down with him to the bottom of his darkest dreams.
His family was better off when he was buried.
Not thinking, Michael gets up, grabs his coat. His brain doesn’t even register what he’s doing. Break out, run, disappear. It’s muscle memory. His eyes clock in the window, he can climb down that thing, easy. Then he’ll walk, or hitchhike. He’ll be gone. That’s all that matters. Not for him, of course. But for them. All of this is for them, it was always for them, it—
Michael’s hand freezes around the knob. A bar of cold air seeps through the window he has pried open.
He sees Sara again by the mailbox, that way she smoothed over her annoyance when she talked to Lincoln.
How am I supposed to explain that to a three-year-old?
He remembers the hate he felt for his brother then, that he had a choice, that he could be with his family if he chose to. And he was walking away.
Coward. Traitor.
How easy it had been to think these words.
To think it would be so much easier to be with them than far from them, that if he were in his brother’s shoes, he wouldn’t hesitate, not for a heartbeat.
“God,” he says.
Closes the window.
Lincoln can run, and he can run, too.
But what about Sara? She can’t run now or fall apart. She can’t afford to. Did he really leave his pregnant wife to pick up the pieces of their family all on her own, because running is the only thing at this point which he knows how to do?
Michael drags in a breath, opens the bedroom door and starts down the stairs.
It’s four p.m., the day before Christmas.
A burnt cookie smell hits his nostrils, lyrics about a silent night but it isn’t silent here, knives grind against boards and go chop-chop-chop, dishes are being washed and a man and woman are talking, his brother and Sara, and there is no ignoring the urge in his blood, in his bones, that tells him to flee.
On this day, like so many, it feels easier to face his demons than his family.