Fic: Breathe Love (9/?)
Oct. 4th, 2006 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aeroport_artTitle: Breathe Love (9/?)
Pairing: Michael/Lincoln
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aeroport_art
Rating: G (up to NC-17)
Spoilers: Up to 2.03 but mild AU throughout
Word Count: 1,643
Disclaimer: Prison Break is not mine, obviously. And I am not making any money from this, obviously.
Notes: Time to take a break from all that angst! Here's a little interlude, so take a deep breath >__< The boys still have a bumpy road ahead of them. Breathe Love is also on prisonbreakfic.com and is actually the more finalized version (I can't help but keep tweaking things :P) so if you'd rather read it there, sans wonky decimal point chapters, you can find it under the same screen name. On the other hand I'm going to keep posting chapters here first, lol. Anyway hope you all enjoy the chapter, and as always feedback = love!
Summary: Michael has always wanted his brother, and Lincoln has to wrestle with the responsibility of a reciprocated love that can never be... or can it? Spanning two decades, this story attempts to explain Michael/Lincoln within the confines of canon.
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 1.1
Chapter 1.2
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 4.1
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Interlude, 1992 ~ 1995
College for Michael was easy, too easy. Once he’d learned how to put the mathematical goggles on, everything and everyone simply became a formula to him. Surroundings were processed as 3D bump maps on a framework scaled to the size of the campus; animals were beating hearts, moving bones, stretching ligaments that reacted to neural impulses. Humans were stereotypes, easily pocketed away into any number of categories; personalities consisted of x number of attributes, people borrowing mannerisms and hobbies and styles of dress from other people to form a generally homogenous group. Nobody stood out because Person A was like Person B in some ways, who was like Person C in other ways, and really they were all just pieces of the same big puzzle. And while sometimes Michael tried to be humble and find a niche for himself to belong to, in the end still he felt like a puppeteer and the world was attached to strings, laid out for him to simply twitch a finger and receive calculated results.
College was a cakewalk. Michael’s classes amused him, even sometimes challenged him, but it was always so straightforward. Solve this exercise, manipulate this program, build this model. So he did all that, threw his time and thoughts into his civil engineering classes because outside of the classroom, outside of his ever-analyzing mind, life was too undemanding.
This isn’t to say that Michael didn’t have friends. People he’d met in the dorms as a freshman or other engineers with whom he’d share classes with, they were all fair game. While at first he couldn’t really stand their simplicity and their single faceted personalities, he eventually learned to stop expecting so much and treated his acquaintances like equations. Everybody wants something from another, and if he only supplied their need then he could garner something back. For example, Mina liked to talk a lot and all she needed was a lenient ear, so Michael would arrange a lunch date if he needed to take his mind off of something. Or when Nelson was struggling in their 170B class, Michael would study with him for the victorious feeling of satisfaction of having helped someone. And of course he had his drinking friends for whiling away the occasional Thursday or Friday night, but they were especially disposable. It wasn’t difficult to find a willing drinking partner in college.
Michael spent his college years seeing life through grids and thinking in binomials because knowledge was power, and in his personal experience, feeling had never been quite as successful as thinking. By the end of his last year, he had everything in his future planned out to be as comfortable and efficient as possible and if he just stuck to it, his life would go as smoothly as the last few years had.
Lincoln never factored into his plans anymore. Michael’s older brother had never behaved as logic anticipated and he was sick of being wrong all the time, hating the foreign feeling of helplessness. No, Michael made things happen. He didn’t let himself be manipulated, and he didn’t let himself get hurt anymore. This is what he told himself for the last three years.
-----
When he moved out of the apartment he’d shared with Michael for six years, Lincoln didn’t think he could ever feel whole again. When he’d broken up with Michael last September, the hollow feeling in his chest had never quite left but the pain had since scabbed over, manageable in its constancy. But when he’d looked into his baby brother’s broken eyes, when he’d hugged the tense and unforgiving body for the last time, he’d felt his heart puncture anew and bleed into a mess inside his chest.
Lincoln didn’t think he could ever love somebody else as much as he loved his little brother.
But now here he was, in a hospital in Chicago on a turquoise hospital bed with Lisa, the woman who he’d thought was a one night stand but had suddenly morphed from being an emotional burden into the radiant mother of his child. His son, borne of their flesh and blood, was currently flailing and howling as the nurse supported the frail neck with one hand and bobbed the body up and down soothingly with the other. When it did nothing to calm the newborn down, the nurse finally returned the crying bundle back into his mother’s arms and he petered out into a sort of discontent burbling.
“Shhh… that’s a good boy, LJ. Shhhh.”
Lisa quietly rubbed the baby’s pink cheeks, fascinated by the softness and overflowing with indescribable peace. Eventually, when the baby was smiling and blinking around the room in interest, she carefully transferred LJ to his dad.
“No, it’s okay I uh, I don’t know how to hold him,” Lincoln shook his head and stepped back hesitantly.
“Oh hush, it’s no problem,” the nurse encouraged. Finally the unshaven man stiffly held his arms out and Lisa placed LJ in, pulling the blanket a smidge higher up on the baby’s tiny chest before letting go. Lincoln withdrew him arms, cradling his son against his zipped-up leather jacket and losing himself in those endless grey eyes.
Lincoln didn’t think he could never feel whole again, and he was partially right. Nothing could ever fill the space that Michael occupied but all of a sudden, this small life he held in his arms, this beautiful creation was healing him with a single gaze, enveloping his injured heart with flowing warmth.
Baby LJ looked up at his father and slowly grinned, then threw his arms out and giggled as if tickled pink by something. And maybe it was funny, the sight of a masculine adult blinking back tears, but Lincoln only laughed heartily in return. Lisa looked at the two of them and marveled at the rare sight of Lincoln Burrows, holding a tiny baby like it was made of glass and laughing aloud like he did it every day.
As Lincoln held his son close to his chest and felt the small hands thumping against him, he vowed that he’d get it right this time. He couldn’t tarnish or ruin such a pure and helpless being. He was going to be a good father, he would do everything in his power to raise LJ well because his newborn son filled him with so much hope and happiness that he just couldn’t fuck this up.
But as aspirations and optimism flooded through him, Lincoln’s pager buzzed and blinked out a message. He reluctantly returned LJ to his mother and checked the small screen.
Julio had another job for him. There was a job waiting for him in East Chicago and as much as he wanted to stay with his family that night, it was simply not a matter of choice.
-----
Although Michael had written Lincoln out of his future plans, that didn’t mean that Lincoln wouldn’t waltz into them on his own.
The second Thursday after Michael had graduated from Loyola University, he was passing the local preschool on the way to a job interview. He’d bought himself a Ford Taurus with the leftover money from his inheritance and was waiting at a red light when he’d idly glanced out the window to the right and saw a bouncy kid grasping his mother’s hand excitedly. At first he only watched out of lack of anything better to do but when the kid turned around, Michael blanched. He knew that face, so similar to Lincoln’s in his youth that he may as well have been looking at his older brother through a time warp. And when the kid stared at Michael through the car window, he was certain. Those lucid grey eyes belonged only to Lincoln and now, he supposed, his nephew as well. The staccato honk from the truck behind him jolted Michael into paying attention to the road and he drove through the green light, shakily willing the shock of the coincidence to leave his system.
But it didn’t work, Michael’s thoughts kept rebounding back to the image of his young nephew with his mother. Michael had arrived at the large office building, glided through his interview for Middleton, Maxwell and Schaum on autopilot, but the entire time his focus was entirely elsewhere.
So Linc has a son. Michael didn’t know how to feel or what to think, all he knew was that the chance sighting had truly fixated his mind on his older brother again, and for the first time in over three years he didn’t try and block the musings out. Linc had a son, who was probably around four years old by now. That woman must have been the mother; blonde, young, pretty. How cushy. He speculated if they were still together, how often Linc saw her, what their son’s name was, and just about everything else that was even remotely related. He wondered if Lincoln was happy with them, happy without Michael. Michael was swiftly being inundated with a floodwall of questions that had dammed up inside him for the last three years and suddenly, just being blissfully ignorant was not sufficient anymore. He had to know, this was Linc, for gods sake. He had to know. Had to see him again. Gods.
When the employee from Middleton, Maxwell and Schaum stood up to signal the end of the interview, Michael blinked twice, shook the man’s hand with a firm grip, and smiled with the slight bow of his head.
“Congratulations, Mr. Scofield. We’ll see you next Monday,” he announced.
“Thank you very much.”
He had time that evening, as usual. Michael could look his brother up then and pay a visit. Put some things behind him, possibly find a little closure. Maybe less than that but maybe, just maybe, he’d find a little more.
Back | Next
Pairing: Michael/Lincoln
Author:
aeroport_artRating: G (up to NC-17)
Spoilers: Up to 2.03 but mild AU throughout
Word Count: 1,643
Disclaimer: Prison Break is not mine, obviously. And I am not making any money from this, obviously.
Notes: Time to take a break from all that angst! Here's a little interlude, so take a deep breath >__< The boys still have a bumpy road ahead of them. Breathe Love is also on prisonbreakfic.com and is actually the more finalized version (I can't help but keep tweaking things :P) so if you'd rather read it there, sans wonky decimal point chapters, you can find it under the same screen name. On the other hand I'm going to keep posting chapters here first, lol. Anyway hope you all enjoy the chapter, and as always feedback = love!
Summary: Michael has always wanted his brother, and Lincoln has to wrestle with the responsibility of a reciprocated love that can never be... or can it? Spanning two decades, this story attempts to explain Michael/Lincoln within the confines of canon.
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 1.1
Chapter 1.2
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 4.1
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Interlude, 1992 ~ 1995
College for Michael was easy, too easy. Once he’d learned how to put the mathematical goggles on, everything and everyone simply became a formula to him. Surroundings were processed as 3D bump maps on a framework scaled to the size of the campus; animals were beating hearts, moving bones, stretching ligaments that reacted to neural impulses. Humans were stereotypes, easily pocketed away into any number of categories; personalities consisted of x number of attributes, people borrowing mannerisms and hobbies and styles of dress from other people to form a generally homogenous group. Nobody stood out because Person A was like Person B in some ways, who was like Person C in other ways, and really they were all just pieces of the same big puzzle. And while sometimes Michael tried to be humble and find a niche for himself to belong to, in the end still he felt like a puppeteer and the world was attached to strings, laid out for him to simply twitch a finger and receive calculated results.
College was a cakewalk. Michael’s classes amused him, even sometimes challenged him, but it was always so straightforward. Solve this exercise, manipulate this program, build this model. So he did all that, threw his time and thoughts into his civil engineering classes because outside of the classroom, outside of his ever-analyzing mind, life was too undemanding.
This isn’t to say that Michael didn’t have friends. People he’d met in the dorms as a freshman or other engineers with whom he’d share classes with, they were all fair game. While at first he couldn’t really stand their simplicity and their single faceted personalities, he eventually learned to stop expecting so much and treated his acquaintances like equations. Everybody wants something from another, and if he only supplied their need then he could garner something back. For example, Mina liked to talk a lot and all she needed was a lenient ear, so Michael would arrange a lunch date if he needed to take his mind off of something. Or when Nelson was struggling in their 170B class, Michael would study with him for the victorious feeling of satisfaction of having helped someone. And of course he had his drinking friends for whiling away the occasional Thursday or Friday night, but they were especially disposable. It wasn’t difficult to find a willing drinking partner in college.
Michael spent his college years seeing life through grids and thinking in binomials because knowledge was power, and in his personal experience, feeling had never been quite as successful as thinking. By the end of his last year, he had everything in his future planned out to be as comfortable and efficient as possible and if he just stuck to it, his life would go as smoothly as the last few years had.
Lincoln never factored into his plans anymore. Michael’s older brother had never behaved as logic anticipated and he was sick of being wrong all the time, hating the foreign feeling of helplessness. No, Michael made things happen. He didn’t let himself be manipulated, and he didn’t let himself get hurt anymore. This is what he told himself for the last three years.
-----
When he moved out of the apartment he’d shared with Michael for six years, Lincoln didn’t think he could ever feel whole again. When he’d broken up with Michael last September, the hollow feeling in his chest had never quite left but the pain had since scabbed over, manageable in its constancy. But when he’d looked into his baby brother’s broken eyes, when he’d hugged the tense and unforgiving body for the last time, he’d felt his heart puncture anew and bleed into a mess inside his chest.
Lincoln didn’t think he could ever love somebody else as much as he loved his little brother.
But now here he was, in a hospital in Chicago on a turquoise hospital bed with Lisa, the woman who he’d thought was a one night stand but had suddenly morphed from being an emotional burden into the radiant mother of his child. His son, borne of their flesh and blood, was currently flailing and howling as the nurse supported the frail neck with one hand and bobbed the body up and down soothingly with the other. When it did nothing to calm the newborn down, the nurse finally returned the crying bundle back into his mother’s arms and he petered out into a sort of discontent burbling.
“Shhh… that’s a good boy, LJ. Shhhh.”
Lisa quietly rubbed the baby’s pink cheeks, fascinated by the softness and overflowing with indescribable peace. Eventually, when the baby was smiling and blinking around the room in interest, she carefully transferred LJ to his dad.
“No, it’s okay I uh, I don’t know how to hold him,” Lincoln shook his head and stepped back hesitantly.
“Oh hush, it’s no problem,” the nurse encouraged. Finally the unshaven man stiffly held his arms out and Lisa placed LJ in, pulling the blanket a smidge higher up on the baby’s tiny chest before letting go. Lincoln withdrew him arms, cradling his son against his zipped-up leather jacket and losing himself in those endless grey eyes.
Lincoln didn’t think he could never feel whole again, and he was partially right. Nothing could ever fill the space that Michael occupied but all of a sudden, this small life he held in his arms, this beautiful creation was healing him with a single gaze, enveloping his injured heart with flowing warmth.
Baby LJ looked up at his father and slowly grinned, then threw his arms out and giggled as if tickled pink by something. And maybe it was funny, the sight of a masculine adult blinking back tears, but Lincoln only laughed heartily in return. Lisa looked at the two of them and marveled at the rare sight of Lincoln Burrows, holding a tiny baby like it was made of glass and laughing aloud like he did it every day.
As Lincoln held his son close to his chest and felt the small hands thumping against him, he vowed that he’d get it right this time. He couldn’t tarnish or ruin such a pure and helpless being. He was going to be a good father, he would do everything in his power to raise LJ well because his newborn son filled him with so much hope and happiness that he just couldn’t fuck this up.
But as aspirations and optimism flooded through him, Lincoln’s pager buzzed and blinked out a message. He reluctantly returned LJ to his mother and checked the small screen.
Julio had another job for him. There was a job waiting for him in East Chicago and as much as he wanted to stay with his family that night, it was simply not a matter of choice.
-----
Although Michael had written Lincoln out of his future plans, that didn’t mean that Lincoln wouldn’t waltz into them on his own.
The second Thursday after Michael had graduated from Loyola University, he was passing the local preschool on the way to a job interview. He’d bought himself a Ford Taurus with the leftover money from his inheritance and was waiting at a red light when he’d idly glanced out the window to the right and saw a bouncy kid grasping his mother’s hand excitedly. At first he only watched out of lack of anything better to do but when the kid turned around, Michael blanched. He knew that face, so similar to Lincoln’s in his youth that he may as well have been looking at his older brother through a time warp. And when the kid stared at Michael through the car window, he was certain. Those lucid grey eyes belonged only to Lincoln and now, he supposed, his nephew as well. The staccato honk from the truck behind him jolted Michael into paying attention to the road and he drove through the green light, shakily willing the shock of the coincidence to leave his system.
But it didn’t work, Michael’s thoughts kept rebounding back to the image of his young nephew with his mother. Michael had arrived at the large office building, glided through his interview for Middleton, Maxwell and Schaum on autopilot, but the entire time his focus was entirely elsewhere.
So Linc has a son. Michael didn’t know how to feel or what to think, all he knew was that the chance sighting had truly fixated his mind on his older brother again, and for the first time in over three years he didn’t try and block the musings out. Linc had a son, who was probably around four years old by now. That woman must have been the mother; blonde, young, pretty. How cushy. He speculated if they were still together, how often Linc saw her, what their son’s name was, and just about everything else that was even remotely related. He wondered if Lincoln was happy with them, happy without Michael. Michael was swiftly being inundated with a floodwall of questions that had dammed up inside him for the last three years and suddenly, just being blissfully ignorant was not sufficient anymore. He had to know, this was Linc, for gods sake. He had to know. Had to see him again. Gods.
When the employee from Middleton, Maxwell and Schaum stood up to signal the end of the interview, Michael blinked twice, shook the man’s hand with a firm grip, and smiled with the slight bow of his head.
“Congratulations, Mr. Scofield. We’ll see you next Monday,” he announced.
“Thank you very much.”
He had time that evening, as usual. Michael could look his brother up then and pay a visit. Put some things behind him, possibly find a little closure. Maybe less than that but maybe, just maybe, he’d find a little more.
Back | Next
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-10-05 08:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-05 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-05 11:07 am (UTC)I'm really looking forward to the next update :D
no subject
Date: 2006-10-05 05:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-05 06:02 pm (UTC)Wait, Michael hasn't seen Lincoln for three years, but LJ looks four? Did I read that right?
I really loved the LJ's birth scene.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-06 02:20 am (UTC)I love your comments, thank you!!
no subject
Date: 2006-11-26 04:20 pm (UTC)And Lincoln with his newborn son? Awwwww! I loved that! But no matter how well intentioned Lincoln is he always manages to screw up, doesn't he? Poor Lincoln.
Loved this chapter, and the awesome one before it helped me fix chapter 6!! Thanks for providing inspiration, sweetheart!
More over the next couple of days, I hope!
*hugs*
no subject
Date: 2006-11-26 10:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-28 05:14 pm (UTC)