Sandcastles (Prison Break Fanfic)

Prologue

If she had ever imagined life on the run, none of this would have made the list. Of course, there had never been a need to her to entertain such a possibility – not until Michael Scofield walked into her infirmary, that is.

Her bare feet were now immersed in the golden sand. The sun shone down on her in all its glory, reflecting off the idle waves. The light breeze, imbued with the smell of the ocean, was embracing her figure, caressing the cuts on her arms. If she closed her eyes, she could all but mistake it for the touch of his fingers. With her eyes shut, with only the calming sound of the waves breaking upon hitting the shore and the laughter of kids building a sandcastle to the left of her, the magnitude of all that had happened over the past week – her father's death, Gila, oh, Gila – felt a little less overwhelming. As broken as she was, she had never felt more alive.

Any day now, she repeated to herself for a countless time, any day he'd be here. She'd bury her face in the crook of his neck and his arms would press her to him, isolating them in a cocoon of ... God, she was insane for merely considering the word. He was all that she had left. It was a fact that should make alarms in her head go off, but it didn't matter. He had annihilated her world, smashed it into pieces so small she could barely recognize herself – she had relapsed, for god's sake –, but they would build a new existence for themselves, together. There was an ocean of possibilities – it was all around her, so bright, so endless. They would get on a boat and sail off into the sunset. Only two months ago she would see it as a cloying trope, but she wasn't in love then. Insane, irrational, devastating, explosive, healing love.

Costa Rica was just an aberration in his plans. That was what Bruce Bennett had told her when he found her in that cheap motel in Nebraska, with blood still oozing from where the shard had penetrated her skin and the collar still wet from when she had been held underwater. She was sitting on a duvet, wanting a shot of morphine, just one, just to stop trembling, for her mind to calm down just a little, like a hundred others perched there before her, wanting to make love, to writhe under his reassuring frame, with her heart racing, reassembled the moment she had laid her eyes on him again.

A car came to a stop on the motel parking lot under her window. She rose with urgency that accompanied her since she had thrown herself from the window in Gila, further exacerbated when she had realized he was gone. She peeked through the curtains that had lost their divine white many washes ago, now permeated with the stench of cigarette smoke.

She held her breath, waiting for a figure to emerge from the parked car. It would certainly be a nameless nobody, like umpteen times before today, the rational part of her insisted, too tiny to silence her grief, panic, fear, longing. She was crazy to think, to just hope that it could be him. How could he possibly know? She had picked a random bus, the fourth leaving Gila, just to make it less obvious. He had been long gone by then, that one more day slipping away from her while she had been underwater. He must have been out of the country by now. Even if he did stay behind to find her, how could he know where she was? She herself had no fucking clue where she had gotten off the bus.

What had she been thinking, leaving their room by herself? The walls the night had built around them numbed her, shielding the insidious threat from her grasp. She had walked up that parking lot with a beam that still felt foreign to her, that should abash her, yet it felt so right. Now she would be hunted down like a dog with rabies, shot without the aim to protect, left behind without a marker to remember her by. And while her life would be ending, he'd have a new beginning. He'd remember her, for a while, certainly. Would he wonder what happened to her? Would he know it wasn't her choice? But the feel of her underneath his fingertips, the taste of her on his lips, it was all too ephemeral, too disjointed to last. He'd meet someone someday, and the woman would distract his thoughts until she'd be nothing more than an occasional echo, silenced by the babel of bills, babies, and freedom. He'd live out what would be the last thing on her eyelids.