masks, pg-13
prison break, miriam hultz ("trishanne smith"), 1000
They are in hiding. Includes T-Bag and Don Self.
Note: I find very little to like about T-Bag and Self and was generally apathetic about Miriam. (Miriam/Trishanne was the undercover agent Don planted in GATE as a receptionist to keep an eye on T-Bag.) Also, I rarely read or write Prison Break fics. Had I not been challenged by a friend this would have never happened.

Although Miriam had been sickened with it at first, she had to remind herself the point was to seem harmless. Very harmless. A skin tight mini-dress with half her chest hanging out would do it. She was not new at playing this game of deception and not new in this particular outfit either, but the stakes were higher and there was little room for Miriam to let Trishanne slip.

The week before Cole Pfeiffer makes an entrance at the GATE Corporation, Miriam is drowning in nervous anxiety. Only two years after leaving the Academy, Don Self had handpicked her to work with him in what he promised her was a high profile Homeland Security case. She would have been a fool to say no. Don had not so subtly hinted that following the successful completion of the operation she would be rewarded with a promotion, commendation and pay raise that would have otherwise taken her years to attain.

Miriam just prays no one would know it took a skanky wardrobe and push-up bras to get there.

When Cole Pfeiffer first steps through the glass doors, Miriam knows something has gone terribly wrong. There is nothing right with the profile Don had given her. The lanky, one-armed, Alabaman is clearly not a well-built, Australian in his 30s.

Her voice is, thankfully, even, but she has to bang her wrists against the edge of the desk when he's not looking to keep them from shaking. She's too stunned to do anything other than exactly as she would have with the 'real' Cole. So, Trishanne flashes him that flirtatious grin, passes on his messages and points him towards his new office.

When he steps out for a half hour, she retrieves three of his fingerprints from a folder in his office so Don can run it through the FBI database when she meets him later that evening. But Don barely looks at what she hands him. With that somber look in his eyes, he tells her he knows things have not panned out as they expected, but their plan won't be changing.

That should have been Miriam's first sign that something was not at all right here.

She doesn't know when she begins to enjoy playing this game.

All Miriam knows that at some point Trishanne feels a thrill whenever Cole lingers his eyes on her longer than they should, watches her as she leaves his office, grazes his fingers across her skin. She feels a strange sense of power over him. They are both hiding behind masks, but only she holds that knowledge. One word from Don and she could take everything away from this man. The power he believed he had in this ridiculous firm, the influence he thought he had over her, his freedom. Just a word.

Cole calls her into his office on a day she is feeling particularly daring. He needs help overriding old firewalls into the GATE mainframe that the 'real' Cole would not have had any problem bypassing.

Trishanne squeezes his shoulder gently and talks him through it. She leans in close to his face, speaks quietly into his ear, slightly twists her torso towards him as she points to the screen. They breathe the same air. If he moves an inch they would be touching. The nearness of him leaves her deliriously high.

Miriam's mistake is believing Cole is the type of man that would cross the line (which is becoming increasingly hazy in her own mind), but he won't go past heated stares and careless brushes against her skin. She leaves Cole's office disappointed.

Miriam watches a man die. She can do nothing to stop it.

"Children, Don! Six children!" Miriam slugs him and watches Self double over. She had touched that man. Been thrilled by his attention even. "Why did you keep this from me?" She knows she is growing hysterical, but she finds it acceptable because this is a pure moment for Miriam in more than one way.

Self sucks in deep gasping breaths of air and then glares up at her. "You do your job, Agent Hultz." He makes no vengeful move towards her, but it is clear to both of them that he is restraining himself.

"Why should I trust you!" she spits out at him.

"Because I need you to, Miriam." His footing falters as he raises himself, looking hopelessly pathetic. Miriam recognizes guilt and shame when he matches his eyes with hers. "I need you."

Miriam feels vile, dirty, and guilty. Trishanne feels these things too, but can't care in the same way. She sees opportunity. One million dollars worth. Miriam wants to call it all off. Don had thrown her in the same room as a murderer, a monster. The type of man she was meant to lock away. Trishanne, ever the moral relativist, settles uncomfortably into the increasingly complicating web. And Miriam, driven by Don's pleas, allows it.

But when Bagwell is forced to throw his mask off by the crazy bitch he seems to be working for, Miriam doesn't hesitate in ripping off hers. She is no longer forced to face the world with someone else's convoluted shades of grays. Miriam knows who she is now. She is no longer the same flirty, scheming woman that had been sitting twenty feet from his office the past week. She wonders how much of this he sees.

It would give her some small sense of gratification that he understands what she really was behind the cover she'd worn for the past two weeks. Yes, they were both pretending, but at least under her farce was someone unmarked by the brand of cruelty and sadism or of any milder evils his past held. Her true self did not need a mask.

It takes no prodding to find out what he thinks. It surprises her how readily he admits his self-shame. Too naive of her to never expect it.

Also naive of her to never expect what came next.