Category: Lincoln and Michael (Genfic)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Lincoln’s POV. Post-episode 115, “By The Skin and The Teeth”-- after the reprieve.
Author’s Notes: Yes, another dark one. Written for the
pbreak_drabbles prompt of “Post-By The Skin And the Teeth”, and also for the prisonbreak100 challenge, where I have the Gen pairing of Lincoln and Michael (this is for the prompt of “Ends.”).x-x-x-x-x
Can’t-breathe-can’t-breathe-can’t-breath
There’s no air inside the hood-- he’s suffocating in all this darkness. His hands grip the chair’s arms, his legs harden with the need to bolt up and escape. His whole body is tense, just waiting… waiting… and god-please-hurry and sorry-Michael and he’s sweat-drenched and dizzy and then his mind is drifting, numbing as the waiting stretches out.
They’re taking the hood off. Why are they taking it off?
Oxygen drifts into his brain, too slowly to dispel the fog. Did it already happen? He doesn’t remember feeling anything.
They lift him up out of the chair, onto his feet. His legs are shaking and his mouth is full of panic-shot saliva, and he just might vomit if he moves. Water from the sponge is still dripping down his face, into his eyes, and it stings. He feels it.
Maybe it didn’t happen.
They lead him back into the hallway, where the light crowds in on him and noises move in dull clouds against his ears. Table. Chair. Michael.
If Michael is here, maybe he’s not dead. Maybe.
The touch of Michael’s hand is solid. Real. Veronica is here too, talking, pressing in on him, but he’s got nothing to give her. There is nothing left even for himself anymore. He is husked-out and hollow, a shadow that should no longer exist.
Words echo, slurry. The sensation of his own voice rumbling out of his chest surprises him. He said something, but it’s already gone. It’s fallen back into nothingness just as if it never was.
Michael’s sharp eyes pierce him for a moment, an expression that is too complex to process. It’s probably love. It all comes down to that in the end. It’s underneath everything Michael has ever said or done to him, done for him.
He is so tired he could fall asleep right here, and when the guards stumble him to his cell he welcomes the sight of that soulless cave. The bed, the darkness-- he embraces them and returns to the sleep he never left.
In. Out. Dreams and questions and memories… He awakes in blackness, dreams of sunlight, slipping in and out of sleep for minutes/hours/days.
The afterlife should be more vivid, he thinks, but no-one has ever answered from experience whether that’s true.
This could be happening, or it could be death. It could be another nightmare, or just a phantasm born out of the last impulses of his dying brain.
He doesn’t know. And it doesn’t matter. Someone will tell him if he needs to wake up.
He sleeps.
--------- fin ----------
