Fic: Of Salvation

[interpretthis]

Title: Of Salvation

Author: interpretthis

Fandom: Prison Break

Pairing: Alex/Michael

Rating: PG-13

Genre: Slash
Challenge/Prompt: psych_30/Learned Helplessness
Summary: It doesn’t hurt.  It doesn’t. [Post "Fire/Water"]

 

             

                The stink of the sewers permeates his flesh, instilling itself so forcefully and so fully that after minutes it is all he can breathe.  All he can feel.  All he can see.  Filth pumps like poison through his veins, pulsing its way into his web of consciousness, a thin-bladed knife sloughing away at gray matter until he isn’t anybody anymore.  Not anybody Michael Scofield wants, at the very least.

 

                And it doesn’t hurt.  It doesn’t.  This realization strikes him to the soiled core and yet it leaves no mark, just bounces off and lies still like the small bird that collides with the clear, stoic pane of glass.  His fists curl in what might once have been anger and he stumbles in the muck that might once have been water before giving up on his feet and sinking down to a low stone ledge, joints protesting and mind so far gone as to not care. 

 

                He supposes he’ll die here, and it doesn’t surprise him.  His death will be that of a smashed gnat on the prolific wall of humanity, scrubbed off and forgotten, left to experience eternity in the bottomless pit of oblivion.  His slaughtered mind touches on Pam.  Cameron.  The life he struck down and buried below the bath that would lave the bird before leading it to its untimely, unforeseen destruction against the translucent pane of consequence.  He thinks about family, and he doesn’t want to think anymore.

 

                Oh, but Michael.  Michael was his salvation.  Destruction.  Salvation again.  The boy managed to break all the rules tenfold while at the same time sticking to them like glue, piety hand in hand with conscience.  The hunt for Scofield wasn’t like anything else – the glorious mental struggle, the fascination, the thrill of taking risk and calculation and determination and battling them out on the mental chessboard they forged for themselves.  Michael’s catch me if you can air served to fuel Alex from day one, and the past's shifting tides of circumstance lead Alex to one conclusion in the present, trapped as he is within his own mind, dejected and alone in the sewers of Sona penitentiary.  Need is a terrible thing.  It really is.  Alex’s mind retains the power and will to realize it as sick self-pity sparks another thought against his mental flint of sardonic truth.

 

                Michael doesn’t need him.

 

                What remains in the interest of self-preservation wants to reassure.  To grab the whirling past and piece it together to come out with I thought as much, but he can’t.  He looks back and tries to decide when he stopped pursuing Michael as an agent and started chasing him as Alex, but the boundaries flush together in one roiling mass of confusion and desperation and he just can’t.  He can’t.  He can’t weed out the wanting him from the needing him.  Not anymore.

 

                His mind tries to take a breath and he blinks, and in that moment sees Michael and knows he is real.  The boy’s eyes are worried, the deep scowl jutting between them is worried, his lips are worried, his goddamn everything is worried and it kills Alex.  It kills him, because he needs him so badly.  Alex lets his eyes fall shut again and wills his brain to buzz, to delve back into the ceaseless circle of want-need-can’t have, because it will make him hate himself more, and that will make him feel better.  But the buzz isn’t loud enough and he all but feels Michael sit down beside him and it hurts, because he doesn’t know what to think anymore.

 

                Michael’s touch on his shoulder is light and warm and it makes him mad, because it is everything – everything – the boy is, and he isn’t supposed to be giving it all away to him.  The buzzing dies away altogether and awareness springs up in its place and he just wants to keep it down and can’t the boy just go away?  But he stays, and, Alex knows, that determines everything.

 

                “Go away.” He sounds bad even to himself, voice raspy and thin and tired.  But he needs to try.  He doesn’t think he can take another jilting from Michael Scofield.

 

                Michael sighs and leans back, rolling his head along the stone wall. 

 

                “I’m not going anywhere.”

 

                There is human silence while the pestilence has its say, the breathing sewers of Sona groaning in the half-light.  Alex grips his elbows tightly, slumps back into the corner, eyes shut tight against the bleeding reality of despair and the truth of one life desperately attached to another.

 

                “When did it change Michael?”

 

                There is quiet beside him, but he knows Michael hears him and he knows he won’t be ignored, so he sits and listens to the erratic beating of his heart in his temples.  He wonders how many beats have passed since their lives first intersected.  Wonders how many his heart will force out before their relationship stops altogether, as his life did with the simple, slick pull of finger-on-trigger.

 

                “I don’t know.”

 

                Michael’s voice is almost as desperate as Alex’s heart, and though he’d pretended to forfeit all hope, he can’t restrain the sick swoop of despair that falls from his sternum to curl in the pit of his belly, ready for a long, parasitic and corrosive stay.  He doesn’t want that.  When he next speaks, each word rides a frantic desperation, the oral manifestation stemming from the renewed shake in his hands, the infrequent, shallow beating of his heart.

 

                “Michael – I just – I -” His fingers swipe at the corners of his lips.  Michael is tense and poised and staring and his gaze is thick with intensity and it’s so everything Alex wants and he breaks.  “I need you.”

 

                Michael’s eyes flash and Alex has seen them do that a hundred times, their truth veiled below the carefully constructed façade of his quarry’s purpose, and for a moment all he is is fear and expectation because those eyes wash him completely of presence and filth and hesitation.

 

                “I know.”

 

                The soft thread of fingers through his calms him and grounds him and stamps through the festering cist of doubt and reassures him that maybe he’s not the only one who needs.  After months of chasing and fighting and needing needing needing, Alex grasps Michael closely and forgets.  The boy gives him everything – everything – and Alex decides that need met with need may serve only to make one stronger.

-------fin-------