Sandcastles (Prison Break Fanfic)

Chapter Two

Lincoln couldn't believe he was back here, at the Agency's headquarters, voluntarily, when the sun was already setting and it was hours after the interviews had ended for a day.

They hadn't gotten far. Michael was going over his plan for escaping Fox River and their subsequent run towards Panama (nitroglycerin was the chemical compound that had almost gotten him killed in the New Mexico desert, Lincoln realized. It even sounded malicious). There wasn't much Lincoln could add. After about an hour, he excused himself and escaped the smell of coffee, only to camp around a vending machine three doors down. Throwing coins (now he always had coins, he mused. While on the run and working with the government, his pockets were brimming with banknotes, brand new, their worth more than what he had ever owned before. Now wherever he went, there was the jingling in his pockets, making him feel like he again had nowhere to go and no idea what to have for dinner) into the coffee vending machine, he was blowing the steam off with the intensity he wished he could apply to his life as well.

He didn't need a fucking shrink (though Agent Spencer had mentioned one will be provided for him should he ask so) to tell him why he needed to be out of that room so badly. Michael had had a glamorous life before he sacrificed it all for him. A job that paid more than Lincoln could ever make on the right side of the law; an apartment that made him feel wickedly important merely for knowing someone who could afford it; a revered position in the most prestigious firm in Chicago, with a career trajectory going nowhere but up, so steeply it made his older brother dizzy with pride; his sprawling community work could almost eclipse Lincoln's extensive rap sheet.

All that was and may one day be Lincoln had taken away from Michael the day he walked into the parking garage with intent to take a man's life. He may not have pulled a trigger; he might not have done so even if Steadman's eyes were still lustrous with life as they faced each other, but did it matter? Did his innocence truly mean anything if his intentions were all but innocuous?

After he and Michael turned in the last Scylla card, he was exonerated. In no official records was he still referred to as a murderer, but countless people were listed as dead and their blood was indisputably, invisibly on his hands. It wasn't the agents sent to execute him that he lamented; his heart did shudder at the thought of the children, the families they had left behind, but they had chosen their careers. They had consciously picked up a gun each day, with no harness keeping them from killing, slaughtering. He and his brother, on the other hand, hadn't.

Lincoln had always been skilled at rationalizing his actions, in eliminating the emotional aspect whenever possible. All the men he killed with a direct action of his hands undoubtedly deserved it. Perhaps, he sometimes caught himself thinking, it was his arrogance convincing him so. Maybe if he thought of his killings as self-defense, there would be no need to admit that while proving his innocence, he turned into a ruthless killer.

The only merciful component of his actions was perhaps that his brother hadn't needed to pull the trigger. He failed Michael too many times to count and desolately believed he wasn't done disappointing him, but at least he saved his brother's soul from this particular burden. However, the truth they never spoke of was that Michael would have done it, had the right person faced the barrel of his gun. With Mahone having met his deserved end before their learning of his whereabouts and the other man vanishing into thin air, Michael had no one to kill but himself, over and over again.

Sometimes Lincoln wondered if it wasn't a blessing in disguise. His brother was no murderer (but he was no bank robber, a con, a burglar either, Lincoln grimly reminded himself). While revenging Sara's death – and everything else they had done to her – would bring him initial solace, the gain would be annihilated by the loss of himself he would face in the long term.