"Casting Stones," for callmetofu
Title: Casting Stones
Rating: PG-13
Category: Gen
Characters: Michael and Lincoln
Requested by: callmetofu
Summary: He’s casting stones not only at his brother, but at what amounts to his own reflected image.
Author's Notes: This is a gen Michael and Lincoln fic set post-series, written for the following prompts: sand, a grasshopper, and marriage or wedding rings, and the quotation I open with below.
“For time is the longest distance between two places.”
--Tennessee Williams
With this ring, I thee wed.
Even through the static of the ancient speakers, her voice is low and melodious, and Michael is reminded that in life, she’d never felt it necessary to raise it to be heard. The thought is immediately chased by the realization that he’s probably putting her on a pedestal, no doubt romanticizing who she was, but right now, with the proverbial dust settling all around him, he doesn’t care. He leans forward in his chair, the grainy image of his mother and his father projected on his wall, and he also realizes it’s all he has left.
They look happy, as, Michael supposes, all brides and grooms do, but the likeness of her smile, larger than life in his living room, captures his imagination, simultaneously warming and breaking his heart, the way nothing else has in longer than he can remember. He watches as the camera falters and shifts, no doubt in the hands of some amateur photographer, then zooms in on the image of their hands-his mother’s, his father’s-as it records this act, this exchanging of rings, that will seal their partnership in this life. He cannot help grinning as the band is slipped onto her finger. The camera angle jerks again, following the movement of Christina’s newly adorned hand as it rises upward to cradle her new husband’s chin and turn his head for her kiss.
He’s never seen this footage before. The reel has been in a box in his storage unit for years-years before Fox River, years before Sona-and he feels chastised for squandering the many opportunities he’s had to view it. He turns to Lincoln, sitting on the couch across from him, and asks him to rewind the reel. They watch it again, and this time, when they come to the same scene, Michael points at the image of their mother’s hand. “I’ve seen that ring before,” he tells Lincoln. It was distinctive; antique silver set with small honey-hued gems-citrine, or perhaps amber?-clustered around the single diamond.
“Of course you have. Mom wore it until she died.”
Michael frowns. “No, I mean, after that.” He feels a quick shiver of something he may have called hope-back then, back before-or perhaps just simple, everyday optimism. “It was in an envelope you were given, wasn’t it, with some of the insurance papers and her will?”
Lincoln grunts. “Yeah, that will. What a joke, right?”
“But the ring, Linc. It was in there, wasn’t it?”
“Nah. I don’t think so, man.” Lincoln stares down at the projector in front of him, tinkering with the metal reel, but something about his manner doesn’t look quite right, as though he’s suddenly feeling ill-at-ease. As though there’s suddenly not enough space in the room, or perhaps, in his own skin. He tugs at the collar of his shirt, and Michael’s eyes narrow.
“Linc?”
“I’m sorry, Michael.”
“No...” Michael rises, shaking his head as disappointment springs from all sides, tightening around him with the ferocity of a chokehold. So much for optimism. “You lost it?”
Lincoln hesitates, bringing one hand up to palm his skull. When he speaks, his voice is little more than a whisper. “I pawned it.”
All the air seems to leave Michael’s lungs. For a moment, he only stares, glassy-eyed as a fish out of water, and then he inhales, harsh and deep. The action seems to draw within him every ounce of blame and resentment he’d thought he’d put aside long ago, and suddenly, he’s livid.
He wants to yell. He wants to throw furniture and punches, but instead, he levels Lincoln with a look of cold, calculated fury that demands explanation. He’s mandating atonement, but deep down, he’s not fooling himself; beneath the surface of his anger is a shallow truth. He’s casting stones not only at his brother, but at what amounts to his own reflected image, each accusation’s splash the very definition of self-destruction.
* * * * *
Don’t come home for dinner.
Lincoln stares down Michael’s seething indignation, and knows he shouldn’t be surprised to find it all comes down to this. That at the end of the day, what’s left between them is a tangled web of shared resentment, dependency, and enablement. It’s been just the two of them, watching each other’s backs, for so long, their record of who started what, who acted when, has become convoluted with time. Faded and cracked with years and pain and blame. In the first days and weeks home from Panama, they had argued incessantly over who was the catalyst. They had fought-still raw and torn from other battles-over which between them had ignited the carnage of ruined lives and lost lives that they had been forced to witness on those sun drenched, sandy shores. You borrowed money you couldn’t repay. You broke out of Fox River. You lied to me about our inheritance. You landed yourself in Sona. Only one thing was still clear, still etched in their minds and one day their epitaphs: they had been in this together. Maybe from the moment their father walked out, maybe from the day their mother breathed her last. Maybe much, much earlier.
He’d pawned their mother’s ring, it was true. He remembers the day he did it; a hot summer afternoon that made his shirt stick to the skin of his back in an excess of sweat and grime and heated need for relief. He’d been in a hurry. In hindsight, he wonders if his rush had been in a vain attempt to fast forward time, to blur the sequence of events playing out right before his very eyes. It no longer matters. What matters now is that his brother is standing before him, laying another sin at his feet, and Lincoln simply doesn’t know if he has the strength left within him to ask penance.
He shuts off the projector, and the room darkens as the light bulb flickers and goes out. The machine whirs for another second, the wheel slowing while the end of the film roll makes contact against the base with a solid whack on each rotation, and then it stops altogether. There’s a beat of silence, and then Lincoln fills it.
“Someday, we’re going to have to stop keeping score,” he says.
For a moment, he doesn’t think Michael will answer. He can see his internal struggle as clearly as if he were made of glass. His brother wants to stonewall. He longs to cling to his righteousness like a lifeline. But not so deep down, Michael must know there’s no one else. There’s no one but them, and to cast Lincoln aside is to ensure that there’s no one there to pull him in when his pride is not enough to keep him afloat. No one there to drag him up and out of whatever trips him up next. He sighs ever so softly, and Lincoln knows he’s going to respond.
“I’m afraid,” Michael begins, then stops, swallowing tightly. “I’m afraid when we do, it’ll mean the game is over.”
Lincoln feels his own throat constrict, more due to the look of agonized regret on his brother‘s face than his words. He makes no attempt to lighten the mood. He locks eyes on him solemnly. “Would that really be so terrible?”
Michael looks down at his tightly clasped hands in his lap. “It wouldn’t give me enough time,” he says slowly, “to make it right.” He looks back up then at Lincoln, his face a study of earnest hesitation, and Lincoln is forced to consider that somehow, against all possible odds, his little brother has retained some shred of his innocence. That he has emerged from the total wreckage of their lives with some carefully hidden fraction of his soul intact.
All at once, he remembers something. In an unprecedented show of mercy, his mind has lighted upon something he can offer. “We do have something else of Mom’s,” he tells Michael, already walking toward the back of the small apartment. In the empty spare bedroom, he kneels in front of a small stack of cardboard boxes. He opens the top one, and begins to dig through it. Michael has trailed after him, and together, they bend over the boxes of random keepsakes and documents, all they have left of their childhood. “It’s got to be here somewhere.”
“What exactly are we looking for?” Michael asks, as Lincoln’s fingers simultaneously curl around a tiny metal object.
“This,” he answers, opening his palm to reveal a delicately cast silver charm.
Michael picks it up with his thumb and forefinger to examine it. “It’s a grasshopper,” he says with a slight laugh. He looks back at Lincoln. “I don’t remember this.”
“I only saw it once, myself,” Lincoln answers, sitting down with his back to the bare wall, watching Michael. “You were too young to remember, but right after Dad split, I had nightmares. Really bad ones.” He pauses, knowing that in present company, there’s no need to further describe the acute terror that lays in wait within dreams. “Mom had to come into my room, night after night, and lay down with me. One night, after weeks of this, she came in as usual, but this time, she turned on the light and sat down with me on the bed. She showed me this charm. She told me it was the last thing Dad had given her before he went away, and that it symbolized good luck. That some people thought it brought abundance.”
Lincoln stares across the room, then shakes his head slightly as though to clear it. “It made me angry,” he admits. “I asked her what kind of person would leave his family, saying good luck on the way out.” He looks over at Michael, whose eyes have softened in sorrow. “Her face just fell,” he continues. “Just deflated like a busted balloon.” He shakes his head. “I meant what I said, but man, I hated myself for saying it. All that anger pouring out, and I was dumping it all on the wrong person.”
Lincoln sighs. “She gave it to me anyway. She put it under my pillow, and even though I didn’t believe any of it, I slept through the night for the first time in days. In the morning, the charm was gone. I never asked her where it went.”
Michael turns the charm over in his hand. “Do you think she knew?” he asks. “Where Dad was, I mean. Why he’d had to leave?”
Lincoln feels familiar despair sluice through him. “I don’t know,” he answers eventually. “Does it matter now?”
Michael doesn’t appear to be listening. He’s still studying the grasshopper, his finger tracing its spindly legs and carefully etched eyes. “I can’t make it right, can I?”
“What?”
“Any of it. I can’t continue to fight this…this current of events.” His breath seems to catch in his throat. “So many people dead. And it wasn’t you, or me, or even Dad who began it. It goes too far back for me to find the source. To stem the flow.” He holds up the charm. “Mom knew that. Whether she knew about the Company or not, she knew enough to know it wasn’t her doing, and wasn’t hers to fix.”
“It’s not yours, either.”
“No.”
Lincoln looks up, surprised. “No,” he confirms swiftly. He wants to validate his brother’s words. He wants to help him walk away from the floodwaters rising up around him. Absolve him, and in turn, be absolved. Because whatever the cost, whomever is to blame, they’ve somehow survived the culmination of their own destiny. They’ve emerged on the other side, gasping and choking, blinking at what is to them a foreign wasteland of a life. But they’re breathing. They’re living. Maybe it’s providence. Maybe it’s fate. But whatever it is, today they’re together, and Lincoln thinks that maybe, just maybe, the tide will turn, and luck will begin to swing their way.
The End.
Rating: PG-13
Category: Gen
Characters: Michael and Lincoln
Requested by: callmetofu
Summary: He’s casting stones not only at his brother, but at what amounts to his own reflected image.
Author's Notes: This is a gen Michael and Lincoln fic set post-series, written for the following prompts: sand, a grasshopper, and marriage or wedding rings, and the quotation I open with below.
“For time is the longest distance between two places.”
--Tennessee Williams
With this ring, I thee wed.
Even through the static of the ancient speakers, her voice is low and melodious, and Michael is reminded that in life, she’d never felt it necessary to raise it to be heard. The thought is immediately chased by the realization that he’s probably putting her on a pedestal, no doubt romanticizing who she was, but right now, with the proverbial dust settling all around him, he doesn’t care. He leans forward in his chair, the grainy image of his mother and his father projected on his wall, and he also realizes it’s all he has left.
They look happy, as, Michael supposes, all brides and grooms do, but the likeness of her smile, larger than life in his living room, captures his imagination, simultaneously warming and breaking his heart, the way nothing else has in longer than he can remember. He watches as the camera falters and shifts, no doubt in the hands of some amateur photographer, then zooms in on the image of their hands-his mother’s, his father’s-as it records this act, this exchanging of rings, that will seal their partnership in this life. He cannot help grinning as the band is slipped onto her finger. The camera angle jerks again, following the movement of Christina’s newly adorned hand as it rises upward to cradle her new husband’s chin and turn his head for her kiss.
He’s never seen this footage before. The reel has been in a box in his storage unit for years-years before Fox River, years before Sona-and he feels chastised for squandering the many opportunities he’s had to view it. He turns to Lincoln, sitting on the couch across from him, and asks him to rewind the reel. They watch it again, and this time, when they come to the same scene, Michael points at the image of their mother’s hand. “I’ve seen that ring before,” he tells Lincoln. It was distinctive; antique silver set with small honey-hued gems-citrine, or perhaps amber?-clustered around the single diamond.
“Of course you have. Mom wore it until she died.”
Michael frowns. “No, I mean, after that.” He feels a quick shiver of something he may have called hope-back then, back before-or perhaps just simple, everyday optimism. “It was in an envelope you were given, wasn’t it, with some of the insurance papers and her will?”
Lincoln grunts. “Yeah, that will. What a joke, right?”
“But the ring, Linc. It was in there, wasn’t it?”
“Nah. I don’t think so, man.” Lincoln stares down at the projector in front of him, tinkering with the metal reel, but something about his manner doesn’t look quite right, as though he’s suddenly feeling ill-at-ease. As though there’s suddenly not enough space in the room, or perhaps, in his own skin. He tugs at the collar of his shirt, and Michael’s eyes narrow.
“Linc?”
“I’m sorry, Michael.”
“No...” Michael rises, shaking his head as disappointment springs from all sides, tightening around him with the ferocity of a chokehold. So much for optimism. “You lost it?”
Lincoln hesitates, bringing one hand up to palm his skull. When he speaks, his voice is little more than a whisper. “I pawned it.”
All the air seems to leave Michael’s lungs. For a moment, he only stares, glassy-eyed as a fish out of water, and then he inhales, harsh and deep. The action seems to draw within him every ounce of blame and resentment he’d thought he’d put aside long ago, and suddenly, he’s livid.
He wants to yell. He wants to throw furniture and punches, but instead, he levels Lincoln with a look of cold, calculated fury that demands explanation. He’s mandating atonement, but deep down, he’s not fooling himself; beneath the surface of his anger is a shallow truth. He’s casting stones not only at his brother, but at what amounts to his own reflected image, each accusation’s splash the very definition of self-destruction.
* * * * *
Don’t come home for dinner.
Lincoln stares down Michael’s seething indignation, and knows he shouldn’t be surprised to find it all comes down to this. That at the end of the day, what’s left between them is a tangled web of shared resentment, dependency, and enablement. It’s been just the two of them, watching each other’s backs, for so long, their record of who started what, who acted when, has become convoluted with time. Faded and cracked with years and pain and blame. In the first days and weeks home from Panama, they had argued incessantly over who was the catalyst. They had fought-still raw and torn from other battles-over which between them had ignited the carnage of ruined lives and lost lives that they had been forced to witness on those sun drenched, sandy shores. You borrowed money you couldn’t repay. You broke out of Fox River. You lied to me about our inheritance. You landed yourself in Sona. Only one thing was still clear, still etched in their minds and one day their epitaphs: they had been in this together. Maybe from the moment their father walked out, maybe from the day their mother breathed her last. Maybe much, much earlier.
He’d pawned their mother’s ring, it was true. He remembers the day he did it; a hot summer afternoon that made his shirt stick to the skin of his back in an excess of sweat and grime and heated need for relief. He’d been in a hurry. In hindsight, he wonders if his rush had been in a vain attempt to fast forward time, to blur the sequence of events playing out right before his very eyes. It no longer matters. What matters now is that his brother is standing before him, laying another sin at his feet, and Lincoln simply doesn’t know if he has the strength left within him to ask penance.
He shuts off the projector, and the room darkens as the light bulb flickers and goes out. The machine whirs for another second, the wheel slowing while the end of the film roll makes contact against the base with a solid whack on each rotation, and then it stops altogether. There’s a beat of silence, and then Lincoln fills it.
“Someday, we’re going to have to stop keeping score,” he says.
For a moment, he doesn’t think Michael will answer. He can see his internal struggle as clearly as if he were made of glass. His brother wants to stonewall. He longs to cling to his righteousness like a lifeline. But not so deep down, Michael must know there’s no one else. There’s no one but them, and to cast Lincoln aside is to ensure that there’s no one there to pull him in when his pride is not enough to keep him afloat. No one there to drag him up and out of whatever trips him up next. He sighs ever so softly, and Lincoln knows he’s going to respond.
“I’m afraid,” Michael begins, then stops, swallowing tightly. “I’m afraid when we do, it’ll mean the game is over.”
Lincoln feels his own throat constrict, more due to the look of agonized regret on his brother‘s face than his words. He makes no attempt to lighten the mood. He locks eyes on him solemnly. “Would that really be so terrible?”
Michael looks down at his tightly clasped hands in his lap. “It wouldn’t give me enough time,” he says slowly, “to make it right.” He looks back up then at Lincoln, his face a study of earnest hesitation, and Lincoln is forced to consider that somehow, against all possible odds, his little brother has retained some shred of his innocence. That he has emerged from the total wreckage of their lives with some carefully hidden fraction of his soul intact.
All at once, he remembers something. In an unprecedented show of mercy, his mind has lighted upon something he can offer. “We do have something else of Mom’s,” he tells Michael, already walking toward the back of the small apartment. In the empty spare bedroom, he kneels in front of a small stack of cardboard boxes. He opens the top one, and begins to dig through it. Michael has trailed after him, and together, they bend over the boxes of random keepsakes and documents, all they have left of their childhood. “It’s got to be here somewhere.”
“What exactly are we looking for?” Michael asks, as Lincoln’s fingers simultaneously curl around a tiny metal object.
“This,” he answers, opening his palm to reveal a delicately cast silver charm.
Michael picks it up with his thumb and forefinger to examine it. “It’s a grasshopper,” he says with a slight laugh. He looks back at Lincoln. “I don’t remember this.”
“I only saw it once, myself,” Lincoln answers, sitting down with his back to the bare wall, watching Michael. “You were too young to remember, but right after Dad split, I had nightmares. Really bad ones.” He pauses, knowing that in present company, there’s no need to further describe the acute terror that lays in wait within dreams. “Mom had to come into my room, night after night, and lay down with me. One night, after weeks of this, she came in as usual, but this time, she turned on the light and sat down with me on the bed. She showed me this charm. She told me it was the last thing Dad had given her before he went away, and that it symbolized good luck. That some people thought it brought abundance.”
Lincoln stares across the room, then shakes his head slightly as though to clear it. “It made me angry,” he admits. “I asked her what kind of person would leave his family, saying good luck on the way out.” He looks over at Michael, whose eyes have softened in sorrow. “Her face just fell,” he continues. “Just deflated like a busted balloon.” He shakes his head. “I meant what I said, but man, I hated myself for saying it. All that anger pouring out, and I was dumping it all on the wrong person.”
Lincoln sighs. “She gave it to me anyway. She put it under my pillow, and even though I didn’t believe any of it, I slept through the night for the first time in days. In the morning, the charm was gone. I never asked her where it went.”
Michael turns the charm over in his hand. “Do you think she knew?” he asks. “Where Dad was, I mean. Why he’d had to leave?”
Lincoln feels familiar despair sluice through him. “I don’t know,” he answers eventually. “Does it matter now?”
Michael doesn’t appear to be listening. He’s still studying the grasshopper, his finger tracing its spindly legs and carefully etched eyes. “I can’t make it right, can I?”
“What?”
“Any of it. I can’t continue to fight this…this current of events.” His breath seems to catch in his throat. “So many people dead. And it wasn’t you, or me, or even Dad who began it. It goes too far back for me to find the source. To stem the flow.” He holds up the charm. “Mom knew that. Whether she knew about the Company or not, she knew enough to know it wasn’t her doing, and wasn’t hers to fix.”
“It’s not yours, either.”
“No.”
Lincoln looks up, surprised. “No,” he confirms swiftly. He wants to validate his brother’s words. He wants to help him walk away from the floodwaters rising up around him. Absolve him, and in turn, be absolved. Because whatever the cost, whomever is to blame, they’ve somehow survived the culmination of their own destiny. They’ve emerged on the other side, gasping and choking, blinking at what is to them a foreign wasteland of a life. But they’re breathing. They’re living. Maybe it’s providence. Maybe it’s fate. But whatever it is, today they’re together, and Lincoln thinks that maybe, just maybe, the tide will turn, and luck will begin to swing their way.
The End.