Sandcastles (Prison Break Fanfic)

Chapter Five

It took Lincoln over a week to trust himself enough to meet up with his brother and be confidently sure he wouldn't flip out. Luckily for him, Michael had flown to Boston almost immediately after breaking up with Jessica to oversee the start of the construction of the building he had designed. Lincoln had seen those plans and they were so intricate that he fully believed his brother should stay there another week, just to make sure that the contractors knew what they were doing and that Lincoln's anger completely dissolved.

"Uncle Mike is coming home today," LJ had reminded him in the morning, as if he could forget. The date was burned in his brain with horror. Because as long as Michael was in Boston and they communicated with short texts of acknowledgements, he could reread those few words (he was never big on texting anyway) and be reasonably sure they were as neutral as he could make them. Once they'd be in the same room together, and he'd stare at those obdurate eyes of his brother's, well, losing it wasn't an impossible contingency.

"Are you gonna go see him?" LJ asked, and Lincoln wished his son wanted their upscale place to himself for the day to bring over a girl. He knew better, though. In his opinion, LJ was spending way too much time with people who thought the past should be dissected and mulled over and fucking never buried. He had never given the permission neither to his son nor to the agent (he refused to even acknowledge her surname these days), but they were meeting behind his back anyway. There could not possibly be any other reason why LJ, too, spoke about Sara as if he expected her to drop by at their party for the Fourth of July.

He really had gone to his brother's with the best of intentions, Lincoln later mused, sitting under the sun of Panama, so unbelievably hot it made him long for the bitter winter of New York. It was a struggle to find the sound of the ocean pleasing when there was a maelstrom of the language he didn't speak all about him and the fucking sand irritated his skin. Nothing, absolutely nothing about Panama was as he had imagined it to be. If this was comeuppance, though, he would bear it. Because a return to New York was out of the question. He was done with that shit.

He waited for Michael in front of his building, every second fighting an urge to smoke. But when his brother finally showed up, he did think for a handful of minutes that it would be fine. Even as he walked through his apartment to the living room and turned on the TV, he was fairly confident. Sure, the walls were no longer adorned with framed photographs of promises of what life could offer if you kept an open mind. And, yeah, the shelves were filled with books so symmetrically as if someone sacrificed an afternoon making sure they were somehow both alphabetized and sorted by the height, and there were no orange pillows on the couch anymore to fall back onto and to love for chasing a bit of the greyness away. Lincoln could even deal with the two coasters his brother laid on the brand new coffee table in front of the television. When he later recalled his last day in New York (which of course he never did, just as he had promised to himself when the elevator stifled his son's sobs), he always concluded that everything started off fine – as fine as the rapport between two brothers who were both fucking broken, each in their distinct yet identical way, could be.

The game was in its last quarter, and Lincoln's favorite team was winning, and the beer was refreshingly chilled, and he was feeling foolish for having worried so much, and then he descried it.

At first he thought his eyes had only caught a shadow at an odd angle. Then his favorite player scored, and he kept staring at it because it was so small and his brain refused to compute it.

Michael was aware of the stare directed at his hand; Lincoln could always tell when his little brother was intentionally looking away, following the players' actions as though it was the finals and he was the staunchest fan. He was never that into basketball anyway.