Sandcastles (Prison Break Fanfic)

Chapter Seven

Sara heard Bryce's rushed steps before he pushed the door open with the force his childish hands allowed. She turned her head from the television but was not alarmed. That kid always chose running over walking, as if the day didn't have enough minutes and he loathed wasting a single one. Or, Sara thought solemnly sometimes, as though he knew how quickly someone could snatch those minutes away from him.

"Mom, dad's on TV," he shouted without looking at her. He glanced around and he had to have gotten at least some genetic traits from her, for she knew immediately what he was searching for. They spotted the remote control at the same time, but she was closer and grabbed it with all her might. She knew she had done it too fast for it to pass unnoticed by Selena and Moni.

Michael Scofield was like a storm, she recalled her own words. He would show up in your life, out of the clear blue sky.

She had a hunch that this time he wouldn't disappear as quickly.

She knew that this day was coming, of course. The Fox River Eight was too big of a story not to one day appear in a random newspaper article detailing the most daring prison escapes, or be a topic explored in a documentary on a crime channel.

But she had thought they still had time, and explanations of the truth were still only adumbrations in her mind.

"Baby, please don't watch that," she pleaded and knew she wasn't doing this right.

"No, mom, it's good!" Bryce exclaimed. He was a happy kid, well, as happy as their purlieus let him, but she had never seen him this euphoric. She prayed he hadn't heard a thing in his bliss. Then she could still explain it all away, somehow. But he must have, for the next thing he said was, "Dad got an award!"

That paralyzed her, and it was all Bryce, his father's resourceful son, needed to take the remote out of her hand. The commercial for washing powder was substituted for his face as swiftly as everything she had come to believe in the past six years was reduced to nothing just moments later. But first, he took her breath away, still, like no time had passed whatsoever. There were those pristine eyes, so clear when he wanted them to be and so obscure when he refused to let her in. The graceful hands that slid down her forearm with perspicuity she couldn't deny even when it had been forbidden to say it out loud or indecent to put it into words. And his mouth that she had until then believed only lied to her unwillingly.

"Well, if that was my baby daddy, I wouldn't find anyone else worthy of me shaving my legs for every day as well," Sara heard Selena's voice somewhere in the distance, and she wanted to ask the two women if they understood now why she had surrendered herself to loving an angel. God, she had not seen enough of him when they had been both alive. Now she had an impulse to laugh because it had been so long and she sometimes feared his face was skewed in her recollections, and this footage she had never seen before pictured him just the way she kept him in her heart. And then it dawned on her that he looked older; not much, but the lines on his face had deepened just enough for her to notice. This hadn't been shot before their meeting in Fox River; no, this was him now, years after she had first told their son that he was dead.

A short text at the top of the screen confirmed that she wasn't crazy. Earlier today, New York. The simple words reverberated in her mind until they disintegrated into unintelligible sounds, and yet they weren't any less brutal.

"Mom?" Bryce said, his voice now drained of elation. She knew she should do away with the worry that tinged his tone, but it was as if all her edicts of the past six years, that it wasn't about her but about her son, were now belittling her.

"Michael Scofield wins engineer of the year," Moni read out loud the larger text. "They're giving out fucking awards to engineers?"

They were, of course. But not to people like Michael Scofield. Not to people who were supposed to have died six fucking years ago.