Work Text:
Title: So much hate for the ones we love
Characters: Lincoln Burrows, Gretchen Morgan, Sara Tancredi, Fernando Sucre, Paul Kellerman, Michael Scofield, Theodore Bagwell, Alexander Mahone, Charles Patoshik, Brad Bellick
Pairings: Michael Scofield/Sara Tancredi; Michael Scofield/Alexander Mahone
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: 236. One thousand promises
Warnings: Spoilers up to season 4.
- Lost in the woods – Frozen II (Lincoln Burrows)
He wishes he could tattoo the fucking blueprint from Sona on his fucking body, get inside of that hellhole and get Michael out. Then save LJ, save Sara and go as far as they can, forgetting the feeling of being chased down like animals for sins they never committed.
It is incredibly weird, right now, finding out that perhaps the place where he’s felt the most comfortable lately is actually Fox River, on his own, waiting for that rotten system to fry him to death.
He doesn’t have a clue as to what to do out in the open, his brother inside, his son captured, dealing with a psycho bitch he cannot read at all.
He’s going to follow orders, fuck morals and everything. He’s made a thousand promises to his son, to Michael, to himself, and he doesn’t plan on breaking them right now.
He’s not like them, he’s not good. And he doesn’t give a damn about what he’s going to have to sacrifice to get them back.
After all, as he desperately tries to forget, this is all his own damn fault.
- Things we lost in the fire – Bastille (Gretchen Morgan)
She should’ve killed the bastard years and years ago.
She should’ve killed him the moment she had found out she was pregnant. Perhaps even before. Perhaps the very first time she met him.
Gretchen can bear with any form of torture invented by man – cause men are seldom imaginative with that sort of stuff; she car bear to be burnt and water boarded, she can suffer through the cut of knives and the sting of bullets. She can be withheld food and water, she can be left in a desert to die. None of that matters. She’ll always make it back, as long as she’s got someone to come home to.
Whilst from time to time she wishes her life had gone down differently, that Emily knew she was her mother, that she could be with her as a mother, whenever she looks in the mirror she knows that none of this is about her past. She is who she is, and despite the thousand promises she’s made to herself during the years, she knows she won’t change. Not now.
She had her chance, years ago. The chance to break free, the chance to live a normal life.
Had she chosen back then to kill Jonathan Krantz instead of seducing him would’ve made a hell of a difference, but she can’t regret it: hadn’t she done that, she’d be dead now.
Or, even worse, alone.
- Alejandro – Lady Gaga (Sara Tancredi)
How much is she willing to bear for the love of a man who’s broken a thousand promises made to her?
Sara looks back at the past few months as if all the time before those has never existed, as if doctor Tancredi, with her respectable job and her respectable father, was nothing more than a ghost haunting her sweetest dreams.
She’s kept up at night by pictures from what’s happened next; by the simple gesture of leaving the door unlocked, the overdose, Panama. The torture, the uncertainty, and finally meeting Michael again and feeling as if nothing had ever happened.
She’ll work hard for her freedom, she’ll make sure that the next years of her life looks nothing like those months. She doesn’t want to feel hunted anymore, she doesn’t want to feel scared.
She wants to feel safe, and feel like that at Michael’s side. When she realizes that, she also has a straight answer to her question.
She’s willing to bear it all for love. She’s willing to bear it all so that Michael will have a chance to make good on all of his promises.
- C’è tutto un mondo intorno – Matia Bazar (Fernando Sucre)
He’s done it all for love, that’s what he keeps telling to himself. He’s done it all for his girl, he’s done it all because he was scared of losing her forever.
They’re all lost in their mess, with the mafia and the conspiracies and the politics and the national security, but Fernando couldn’t care less about it.
He’s escaped Fox River like a suicidal man, a very stupid one. He’s given up on everything he had just because Maricruz had left him no choice, but he still doesn’t regret it.
He’s made her a thousand promises, and he’s yet to find a way to fulfil even a single one of them; but he’s working on it.
He owes Michael more than he’ll ever be able to pay back, but at the same time he doesn’t let himself been dragged too close to his mess.
They might have all forgotten how this all started, but he sure as hell didn’t.
He’s a fugitive for a damn good reason. And he’ll never stop chasing after Maricruz to make this whole hell be worth it.
- I’m a bitch – Alanis Morissette (Paul Kellerman)
He’s worn so many clothes, so many masks, so many personas, that somewhere along the line he’s lost sight of who he really is.
He’s known it since he’s started this life, he’s known it wasn’t going to be a very long one unless he had learnt to compromise on basically everything.
But as he wears his high uniform with the clear awareness that these are his final moments, he stops to look in the mirror and he’s surprised by what he sees.
Paul Kellerman. Simple as that.
The man who had broken one thousand promises, killed one thousand men, betrayed many, many more, all in the name of…
He smirks, because despite the momentum being all wrong, he can’t help it.
In the name of remembering his own name at the very end, and remembering he was a whole other person. And that he’s fucked that up just because he’s choses to delude himself, to care about a bitch, without realising that as she rose, he was digging his own tomb.
Paul Kellerman. He was a decent man.
The one he’s now is most certainly not anymore.
- Adiemus – Enya (Michael Scofield)
Alexander Mahone.
Michael wouldn’t trust him to find a perfectly useless pen, not in this state. Not high, not in withdrawal. Not even sober, not after all he’s done.
As the man pins him against the wall, anyway, he finally sees something different in him. Something other than the junkie fed who’s hunted them down like animals. Other than the man who killed his father.
Michael has made one thousand promises to one thousand different people, and he’s unwillingly betrayed lots of them, but he doesn’t quite feel the same as he tells Alex he’s going to get him out of there.
Every fibre in his body tells him to leave him there to rot, and he’d do that so gladly. But he just can’t.
For some reason even his brilliant brain can’t comprehend, he wants to help the man. Help him up, help him out.
He’s knows he’s going to get screwed a thousand time over for this, and yet he doesn’t care.
They got in this hell separately, they’ll make it out together somehow.
- Think u – Fujigaya Taisuke (Theodore Bagwell)
He liked his hand.
A lot.
Theodore has never hidden his desire to slaughter John Abruzzi, and that was before he chopped a limb off of him. Now, he wants to see him slowly choke in his own blood whilst trying to beg for mercy.
And that’s not even the worst part.
The pretty girl’s tried to screw him times and times again; even more than Theodore’s actually tried to screw him, figuratively or not.
Michael fucking Scofield has made a thousand promises, kept a few and forgot most, but he can easily overlook that. Hell, he can even respect him for it, since he didn’t think a pretty little thing like him had it in himself to fuck around with people like that.
He can’t forgive his current state, though. He can’t forgive having a fucking veterinarian sew up his hand, he can’t forgive the pain.
He can’t forgive the humiliation.
They’re all headed to the same place, they’re all headed to fucking Utah, so he know he’s going to see Michael again very soon. And even though the sight in itself is going to please him a lot, it’s going to be even more satisfying to cheat him one last time, to let him see he’s been wrong all along underestimating him.
He’s going to show him very precisely where he can stuff his fucking degree.
- Erinnert – Silly (Alexander Mahone)
He doesn’t want to be here.
He wants to sit in a corner of some dark road, shoot something up and let himself die just like that.
Alex has been through a lot which he thought he couldn’t bear in his life, but right now Shales, what the Company had him do and Sona, those all look like heaven when compared to the fact that Cameron…
He shut his thoughts off, because the words alone are unbearable.
He still goes on, anyway. He goes on because he has a man to torture for what he’s done, and he goes on because…
Well. Because of Michael, really.
Thinking about they started off, this feels ridiculous. The way he talks to him, the way he soothes him, the way his words make everything seem doable, faceable. Less tragic, even.
Alex wishes he could let himself die, but never when he’s with Michael; he makes him want to keep on living, instead.
And he’s going to do just that, to see where the thousand promises Scofield has made are going to lead.
- Crier tout bas – Cœur de Pirate (Charles Patoshik)
Charles knows he can’t trust the words the cop is saying.
Well, he knows he can’t trust anyone, because that has never done him any good, not once in his life. Everyone, in the end, betrayed him.
But what he’s saying makes sense, a whole lot of it. He doesn’t want to go back to prison, because he has a strong feeling he’d die there, this time for real. He’s tired of white jackets, tired of pills, tired of the haze, of the people.
Holland.
He can’t go to Holland either.
The thought is excruciating. Of the thousand promises he’s made to himself, this is the one which he believed the most in. He just needed to follow the painting, it should’ve been easier than this. He doesn’t know how he ended up there in the process, listening to those awful words which sound awfully real.
Charles stops thinking all of a sudden, because it’s too much to bear. He leaves the reins to Haywire instead, because he’ll know what to do.
Falling down seems like the easiest thing he’s ever done in his life.
- The heart of everything – Within Temptation (Brad Bellick)
He’s a moron. A sly, cowardly, idiotic moron; he’s been his whole life, and up until a very short while ago he thought that it was all he was ever going to be.
He’s never had a friend, a girlfriend; he’s always thought his mother too despises him, on a level.
The desert changed that, somehow. Fernando Sucre did, too.
Brad thinks back to all the racial slurs he’s uttered against him, all the cruelty he’s dispensed just for fun, all the ways he’s experimented to make his life, and that of every other convict, a living hell.
He doesn’t regret it, per se, because he thinks that’d be hypocritical; he’s ashamed of it though, a lot.
And of all the times he’s told that to himself, of all the thousand promises he’s made to the mirror to try and act bravely for one fucking time in his life, he figures this is as good as any.
Sacrificing himself for them is such a stupid thing to do, but it fits his character perfectly. So the sound of the water coming scared the shit out of him, but the vain side of him is still glad to at least be dying a fucking hero.