Sara stared through the viewing window from her office into Exam 1. The pane was so thick, the image on the other side--a man lying prone on the rolling gurney--appeared almost opaque, wavering with the subtle undulations of the safety glass. She rocked gently on her heels, arms crossed in front of her, thinking.

“Have you called in the transfer to Mercy?”

“What?” She turned toward the doorway. Katie stood waiting, her coat slung over one shoulder. “Uh, no. Not yet.”

“You want me to call it in?”

“No, that’s alright.” Sara smiled. “Go on home.”

Katie lifted one eyebrow. “But you’ll call, right? Because that stab wound is not pretty.”

Sara turned her gaze back to the glass. “I just want to talk to him for a moment, now that he’s conscious.” She raked one hand through her hair, resisting the urge to rub circles against her temple in an effort to soothe the headache that throbbed with a dull ache just underneath her skull. She was so tired. She turned back to Katie. “It doesn’t make any sense, right?”

The other woman shook her head as she gathered her purse and keys. “Doesn’t fit his profile, no.”

It had been a rhetorical question, of course, and Sara only nodded, then watched Katie’s retreating back as she left the infirmary, the outer door clicking closed with a sharp sound of finality behind her. A few seconds later, Sara pushed open the door to Exam 1, and stood over the gurney.

“Charles? How are you feeling now?”

Charles Westmoreland turned his face on the stiff plastic toward her. “Been better, Doc.”

Sara did her best to keep her tone conversational. “It’s a nasty cut you’ve got there,” she agreed.

“At least I‘m not bleeding all over myself anymore, right?” He attempted a weak smile.

Sara returned it. “That’s a start, but I’m going to send you to Mercy tonight, just to play it safe.” She paused, turning to get a fresh 4x4 bandage from the cabinet. When she returned to his side, Westmoreland‘s eyes were closing. He wouldn’t have the energy to speak for long. “Charles?” He blinked rapidly for a few seconds, fighting sleep, then focused briefly on her. “Tell me how this happened again?”

He shook his head feebly. “C’mon Doc, I’ve already gone over it all with The Pope, and you.”

“I know.” She slowly peeled the used 4x4 off his wound, eying the surrounding skin for discoloration. “But the tunnel, below the break room. That part…that wasn’t your doing, was it?”

He shifted uncomfortably. Sara studied the vein that throbbed a bit wildly at the base of his throat. The sight made her wonder what a heart rate monitor would display were she to utilize one right about now. “Why?” he eventually answered, his voice carefully light. “You don’t think I’ve got the muscle?”

Sara concentrated on holding the fresh bandage in place with two fingers while cutting surgical tape into several strips. “It’s not a one-man job,” she replied evenly.

Westmoreland was silent for a long time. The new bandage was secure by the time he spoke. “Well,” he said, “even if I’m not as…spry…as I once was, I’m also no snitch. That much hasn’t changed.” Sara looked directly at him, and now, he stared back at her unwaveringly. “So. When does my ride to Mercy get here? Nothing waiting for me here but a long, long stint in the SHU.”

His evasion was so complete, and delivered with such decisiveness, Sara couldn’t help but be reminded of someone else entirely. She frowned, then sighed. “I’ll call you in right now.”

Veronica was waiting for Michael at 9:30 am the following morning, filling the second-earliest visitation slot. She had seen Lincoln first, at nine. Letting her briefcase slip off her narrow shoulder and fall heavily to the table, she didn’t waste time, attempting to answer as many of Michael’s questions as she could at once. She explained hastily that Lincoln’s clemency had been conditional. Without the evidence necessary to grant a full pardon, his sentence had been reduced from the death penalty to life with the possibility of parole in 20 years. At first the news hit Michael like a blow, but across the table, Veronica’s eyes were shining; she looked almost giddy for the first time in years.

“I still can’t figure out how it happened, but it’s the best we could have hoped for,” she said. “I’m working with a new firm that deals extensively with parole board hearings, and there’s a good chance we can get that sentence reduced significantly.” She had paused. “I’m working on reducing your sentence, too.”

Michael leaned forward, catching and holding her large eyes over the distance of the table between them. “Don’t worry about mine.”

“Don’t be stupid, Michael,” she had said, rising as the C.O. called for the end of visitation. “We both know you don’t belong here.”

He had thought of the way in which, upon word of Lincoln‘s clemency, he had effectively crushed the only way out for more than one desperate and dangerous man. He still had a few cards left to play, a few points of leverage which he could apply against the inmates, but not much. He hadn’t argued further.

He expected significant fall-out. Walking back from visitation, he knew he didn’t have a contingency for cancelling the escape. The only circumstances for which he ever foresaw himself calling it off had been his own death or Lincoln’s. In other words, when he had absolutely nothing left to lose. Now, they were both very much alive, and the amount he stood to lose made his head spin. He had five years to serve, and would spend every minute of them locked in this concrete box of engineering marvel, incarcerated with Abruzzi, T-Bag, and C-Note, all of whom now saw him as a liar and a fraud. Incarcerated as well with Sara, who, likewise, no doubt now saw him as a liar and a fraud.

She switched his appointment time from early afternoon to mid-morning. When he arrived at the infirmary at ten am, he immediately realized why. There was a line of inmates a dozen deep in the outer sick bay, with half as many guards sprawled in metal chairs and leaning against the walls, sipping coffee. The rookie C.O. who had escorted him from Gen Pop groaned audibly at the sight of the crowded room. Another guard standing across the way laughed, then tossed him a section of the paper he was reading. “Welcome to the morning rush.”

She was implementing a buffer of sorts, a built-in safety in numbers, between them. Michael had no choice but to sit and wait. Every so often, he caught a glimpse of her through the open door, moving with efficient speed back and forth from the various exam rooms and her office, delegating at least half of her patients to her nurse as she moved on to the next. She was wearing something in a rich, dark brown; fitted, and with a V-neck. Short-sleeved, because with the sleeves of her lab coat rolled up, her arms were bare, her skin softly pale in the light coming through the window as she flipped the pages of the chart she was studying, standing in the doorway of the infirmary. She was checking off patients quickly, and while he waited, Michael tried to keep his mind where it was most needed--he was now in as much need of a plan to stay alive in Fox River as he had been to get out of it. When he was finally ushered into Exam 7, however, and she entered the room, her sheer physical proximity cleared his head like a quick whiff of ammonia. Like the sharp sting of alcohol in his nostrils. The sight of her prompted him to simultaneously lose all interest in sorting out his tenuous inmate relations, as well as become even more desperate to resolve them than before.

She took his averted expression in stride. “Something distracting you?”

He looked up at her from his perch on the end of the exam table. Her face was slightly flushed, no doubt from so much rushing around, but her eyes were a bit too bright to be attributed to merely the demands of her morning. “No,” he answered evenly, offering her a half-smile. “Why? You?”

She shook her head quickly, her hair, loose today, falling into her face for an instant before she tucked a long strand of it hastily behind one ear. He watched her fingers brush against the skin of her cheek, a rush of deja vu consuming him as he felt the ghost of sensation tingle along his own fingertips at the memory of his own hand skimming the impossibly soft skin behind her ear. There had been something so intimate about the feeling of his hands in her hair, almost as intimate as his mouth on hers, he longed to reclaim it. Reclaim her.

She frowned, and he immediately straightened, fixing his face into something he hoped resembled complacency. “Actually yes, I’m distracted,” she said abruptly, and he looked back up, startled. “I called a sixty-eight year old man into Mercy last night for a potentially lethal stab wound. A man with a spotless 30 odd year old record of good behavior, until yesterday.”

His mouth felt suddenly dry. “Is he going to be alright?”

Her face softened, just a degree. “I think so.” Her voice lowered to an intense, breathy whisper that made the blood accelerate in his veins, despite the frustration etched across her face. “Why is Westmoreland in Mercy, on his way to the SHU? Why is there a hole below the C.O. break room?” She paused. When she spoke again, the words seemed to get lodged in her throat. “Why did you want my keys?”

He wanted to answer. He struggled to piece together an explanation he could offer her, but before he could even begin to form one sentence, she held up one hand, effectively silencing him. She took a breath that seemed to draw her up several inches. “And Michael, why do I know that I should not--cannot--hear the answers to these questions?

For this, ironically, he had an answer. “Because you’re right.”

She turned toward him, and he was startled anew by the intensity he could read all over her face; she was standing with her profile turned to the doorway, and the sight nearly made him flinch. If anyone else glanced over and saw her expression, they would misunderstand. They would see too much emotion, and they would take it for something it was not…something that it could not be. Something that went beyond concern, bordering dangerously on personal investment. Something akin to passion.

“I didn’t want to involve you,” he offered, and the statement sounded weak even in his own head. “I never did!”

“You keep evading! You keep deflecting!” Her voice was now a fierce, high whisper, and Michael had to literally bite his tongue to keep from contradicting her. To keep from yelling, and drawing attention to them both. “Over and over,” Sara continued, “I’ve proven my desire to help you--I’ve sympathized, I’ve bent rules, I’ve…God.” She put one hand abruptly to her face, then dropped it just as quickly back to her side. Shaking her head slightly, she shifted gears. “You’re saying you have nothing to do with Westmoreland? Nothing to do with Bellick?” She stared straight into his eyes, then away again just as quickly. “Your face? It’s a shield. Everything just bounces off of you!”

Michael did answer her now, attention be damned. He reached out and captured both her wrists in his hands. Her entire body seemed to still and stiffen at the shock of his touch, but she didn’t pull away, and he felt strangely vindicated. “If I’m deflecting, it’s to shield you. It’s to protect you. Tell me you don’t know that!”

She didn’t argue, and still, she did not pull away. She only breathed in and out; Michael looked down, trying to untangle the knot of explanations that filled his head, his eyes on the quick rise and fall of the abacus medallion settled against her chest. “Lincoln was going to die,” he told her unnecessarily. “We--I--was suddenly caught up in this surreal insanity, this alter-reality where everything became twisted and backward, and now, it’s over.”

Michael suddenly realized he was still grasping her hands, with the door open and their voices, though hushed, speaking volumes. He dropped them, and she tucked them hastily into the pockets of her lab coat, throwing a look over her shoulder toward the hallway, then back again, to him. He continued right where he‘d left off, as though he’d never stopped speaking. As though they‘d never been touching. “I really think it’s over, and I’m here, and will be…and I want to start over, where you’re concerned.”

The admission surprised him. He turned the words over again in his head, realizing that what had begun seconds before as nothing more than a desperate attempt to ease her frustration was now a plaintive request issued as much for his own sake as for hers. Perhaps more so. He threw one more glance toward the hallway, then lowered his voice again. Let me start over.”

This time, Sara was the one to look slightly stunned. She remained silent for a beat, and then nodded slowly. “Ok,” she whispered, as though she had strength only for that one concession. An instant later, she turned her gaze away from him, to a fixed spot on the white wall above the clock, and Michael got the impression that she considered this conversation to be over. Her eyes must have eventually alighted upon the medical supply cabinet, jolting her back to her purpose--their purpose--in this room, because she moved swiftly in that direction. He watched as she prepared his insulin on the sterile tray, recognizing this sudden burst of activity for what it was, a chance to regain her composure. A chance to regain some sense of control. He conceded it willingly, silently studying the straight posture of her back as she worked, memorizing the tense angle of her shoulders and coveting the long sweep of her hair, almost crimson against the white of her coat.

When she turned back to him, her eyes were softer, missing a bit of the frantic glint that had met him at the door. She drew up a stool and wheeled toward him, tray in hand, and he offered her a smile. “So,” he said pointedly. “I’m Michael, by the way.”

Sara’s eyes shot back up to his, something between a laugh and a sigh momentarily caught in the back of her throat, and then she searched his face in almost-suspicious assessment. Michael wondered if she was trying to decide whether he was making fun of her--he wasn’t--and then she must have come to the same conclusion for herself, because her eyes crinkled almost indiscernibly at the corners in silent mirth.

“Scofield,” she answered, almost experimentally. She smiled back. “I read your report.”

He leaned forward on the exam table. “And you are?”

She hesitated again, but only for a beat. He watched as she dipped her head to one side, as though still studying him. As though still grappling with something difficult to gauge. Finally, she seemed to come to some conclusion. “Sara will do.”

His eyes must have widened in surprise, because she laughed out-loud. The sight of her like that--genuinely amused, if only for a moment--combined with the knowledge that he could be the catalyst for such a reaction, caused a fist-sized lump to rise with alarming speed at the base of his chest. “Thank you,” he whispered.

Traffic into downtown was particularly brutal that night, and by the time Sara pulled into the underground parking garage of her building, the digital clock on her dashboard already glowed 8:48 pm. Someday, she thought, she’d manage to get home in time to make dinner. It would probably help if she ever clocked out of Fox River before seven.

Finally closing her front door behind her, she moved from the front of her apartment toward the back, flipping on lights and shuffling through her stack of mail as she went. In the kitchen, she stared into the open refrigerator for a long moment before reaching, without much enthusiasm, for a carton of day old Thai take-out.

Her phone rang just as the microwave announced the end of its two minute heating cycle. Reaching for a fork to stir the contents in the carton, she glanced at the caller ID before cradling her phone between her ear and shoulder. “Hi, Dad.”

He didn’t waste time on preliminaries. “The Pembroke Clinic is overstaffed at the moment, and you’re hardly in any position to apply at Danesbury Outpatient, with their penchant to treat recovering prescription med addicts alongside the odd case of strep throat, but I’ll keep looking.”

Sara stared down at the Pahd King noodles congealing at the bottom of the cardboard carton. “Ok.”

He must have heard the clipped tightness of the single word, the anger that shimmered, like heat radiating off a sidewalk in August, unseen but unchecked, all around it. “You promised,” he reminded her sharply.

“I promised I’d carefully consider leaving Fox River if you found another position I felt was suitable for me,” she countered levelly, straightening her shoulders as though he could actually see her holding her own. At the time, when she had been arguing for Lincoln Burrows in the suffocating warmth of her father’s plush office, she had meant it. She still did. Being careful, being deliberate in considering all her options…especially now…was something she should pursue whether Frank Tancredi had a hand in it or not.

But, of course, she wished he didn’t. “You better believe you will,” he was saying now. “And I’ll tell you who else should be job hunting. Henry Pope. I mean, my God, Sara, first the riot and this whole Burrows circus, and now I get news of an inmate managing to dig what amounts to the Washington Street Tunnel right under the guards’ noses.”

She leaned back against the counter on one elbow, letting her palm come up to support her forehead. “It seems they’ve got that all under control, Dad.”

“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”

She took a breath, stabbing despondently at a noodle. “Well, not my job, right?”

“Not for long, anyway.” His tone lowered. “And I’m not just spinning my wheels about that, Sara.” She opened her mouth to argue, or maybe placate, she wasn’t sure which, but he talked right over her anyway. “Listen, I’m going to be in Washington for the next week. This Burrows business didn’t do me any favors. If you need something, you need to call Bruce.”

I won’t need anything, she thought fiercely. I never do. She knew it was a lie. She knew she had been begging him for something only he could provide less than 36 hours ago, and that he had the power to remind her of it, again and again, with every means at his disposal, for as long as he wished. Still, it made her feel marginally better to pretend otherwise.

After she hung up the phone, she sat in the living room with her dinner, but she was no longer hungry. She turned on the TV, but after flipping the channel ten times in less than a minute, she gave up trying to find something to hold her attention. Something already was.

By the time she went to bed, she could no longer keep the thought of him at bay. She fell asleep with the feel of strong, competent hands framing her face. Of long, graceful fingers tangled in her hair, and in her dreams, they were in a room with no doors and no windows. The hands on the clock on the wall never moved, and when Michael kissed her, she didn’t feel torn in two. She didn’t feel the tug of responsibility or the fear of exposure. She didn’t look over her shoulder. She just sank into him, letting him hold her. Letting him lift her. Letting him carry the weight of her life on his shoulders. Just for tonight.