Fernando Sucre. Tuesday 11 p.m. Airport.

Lincoln stared at the words on the crumpled piece of paper, then checked his phone again to see what time it was – eleven forty-five.

He was not the only man waiting, alone, lifting a sign with a person's name written on it. But he was the one who had been waiting the longest.

"So he's late," he muttered to himself. "No biggie."

A contrast with the current state of his thoughts, which was more along the lines of –

Michael asks you to do one thing, just one thing, and you've already screwed it up.

Not that a late flight was Lincoln's fault by any means; but Lincoln felt it presaged his own failure. Felt he had agreed to help his little brother, because that was the only thing he could do, but he had no remote idea what he was doing.

Standing there, holding that sign –

A bloody fraud.

That was what Lincoln felt like.

A fraud, working at the Everest, pouring champagne into the glasses of men and women who wore thousands of dollars on their backs, Armani jackets, Jimmy shoes, diamonds on the ears or fingers or necks of the women. Waiting on them, the invisible hand who brought their meals, careful to catch every word they exchanged.

A fraud to his brother, who deserved more than Lincoln could ever give back.

And a fraud to Veronica –

Her words flashed into his brain.

I won't be treated like this, Linc.

Lincoln was plunged so deep into his thoughts, he hardly registered the man who squinted his eyes at the sign in his hands, and walked to meet him.

"Are you Michael Scofield?"

Lincoln's grip tightened around the piece of cardboard. Feeling more a fraud than ever, he said, "Uh – no. He sent me." He took a closer look at the man – latte-colored skin, shaven skull, in the neighborhood of thirty. "Fernando Sucre?"

"Sucre is fine."

They attempted to shake hands.

There was the cardboard sign Lincoln was carrying and Sucre's luggage.

"And – you are?"

"Lincoln. Burrows."

A film of sweat formed on his forehead, and he resisted the urge to wipe it.

Only the hopeful look in Sucre's eyes could have made Lincoln feel worse – feel that he was currently meeting with a man whose problems, whatever they were, he would have no idea how to fix or handle.

"So, um – let me give you a ride, okay? Michael's left some things out about you," that was true, if 'some' meant 'all'. "We should probably talk."

Sucre nodded his head. "Right," but his face was plain with distrust, the sort that grows even in the sweetest-natured souls after they've been had one time too many.

For the first time since Lincoln had agreed to do this, he felt a little at ease.

Fernando Sucre looked like his kind of guy.

The kind that's no stranger to small-time crime or shady agreements; who sat at the great table of life and played the cards nature had dealt him, and who didn't feel especially bad about cheating – who felt that cheating was just the natural resort of the man with a bad hand.

"It's okay," Lincoln said; tried to think of the words that would have sounded so right coming from his brother. "I'm here to help – at least, I'll try."

That wasn't enough to win trust, of course; but it didn't look like Fernando Sucre had all too many options.

As a matter of fact, Lincoln reckoned, the help Michael had promised him was maybe the last hope for him – the last joker in the hand he was playing.

…

The first text Michael saw when he switched his phone back on, after his flight, had the words "government" "polls" and "US" in its ID.

It wasn't the first of those Michael, or any other American citizen, had received since the beginning of Sara's term.

If you had a smart phone, you could download an app created by the government that aimed to 'keep the American people informed about the state of politics inside the country'. The aim was also, obviously, to get as high a rate of participation as possible in the frequent polls Sara's administration orchestrated, although there were alternative means for those who owned neither a phone nor a computer.

Michael couldn't help but sigh as he read, Please give your vote on the following question: Should access to guns be made more difficult nation-wide? Yes – No. Then, if you voted 'yes': Which of these options do you think should be adopted? And you were free to approve or veto all among a long list of suggestions, among which: Forms and detailed background checks upon purchase and Restricting the NRA's rights to broadcast ads and further publicity rights.

"Jesus, Sara," he said softly.

"What's that, sir?"

"Nothing," he told the driver whose taxi he'd just entered.

But the dialogue went on in his head, as he pictured the stately, dignified face of the woman he'd fallen in love with the year of the campaign.

Are you trying to get yourself killed?

Was she, really?

He still voted yes and approved most of the solutions offered.

In an ideal world, this should be happening. Maybe even in this one.

Was it so selfish of him to wish that someone other than Sara should be risking their lives for it?

The driver dropped him off at the address of the apartment where he'd managed to secure a room, in the nick of time, before he booked his flight. As he climbed the staircase, disturbing a family of roaches passing and coming across several empty beer cans among other debris, he repeated to himself that this was going to be temporary.

True, he could have just gone to a motel, but he didn't want to have to concern himself with finding a more stable place to live for the next few months. A room in a shared apartment wasn't great, but it wasn't as if Michael had carried anything incriminating, like his spider web, with him.

Given how he'd been living without a job for over a year, it was best he didn't squander all his savings in rent.

Besides, a motel room would have been too cruel – too full of the sweet-and-sour memory of Sara's body, of their improvised rendezvous back when she was still a presidential candidate.

And Michael knew he needed to keep his head clear.

He could not afford to lose himself in the dreamlike limbo of memory, the torturing rewind of their time together flashing him by day and night.

A woman opened the door for him when he knocked – she was younger than he'd expected, and strikingly beautiful.

"Uh – Nika?"

"Yes."

She took a step back to let him in.

He was glad to see the inside of the apartment looked nowhere near as much like a shipwreck as what he had seen of the building so far.

"We spoke on the phone."

She said again, "Yes."

The look in her eyes was steady. He could tell she knew perfectly who he was – had wrapped up his identity in a small, unadorned package. He was the guy who would pay one hundred a week for the small room she had no other use for, and hopefully, he would know how to make himself invisible, or the next best thing to it.

"Well –"

She shot across the room – it must be the living room, though there was too little furniture for him to be able to tell for sure – and opened a wooden door. Through the crack, he could see a single bed, one chest of drawer, and one small table, as advertised.

"This is the room."

She didn't say your room, like she was showing it to a potential buyer – like he might take a look, not like what he saw and leave.

The look on her face was still guarded when she looked back at him. He tried to smile as innocuously as possible. "Good. This is perfect."

She blinked, maybe in surprise. Her face showed no visible emotion.

He plucked an envelope from his coat pocket and handed it to her – it was best to give her the money straight away, so she wouldn't spend the first week wondering whether he was some scamming creep.

She looked inside the envelope and again, there was that line between her brows, like she couldn't bring herself to accept the signs that suggested he was trustworthy.

"Well, I'll just go and settle in."

He went inside the small room and sensed she was watching him until the very second that he closed the door.

The room was clean, but it smelled rank, and there was no window to let the light in.

Welcome to Washington, he thought, and sat on the bed, after removing his coat and dropping his bag on the carpet.

He had little to unpack. Of all the confidential secrets he'd unearthed in the past year, he had burnt all written traces, after giving it all to Sara in the shape of a notebook. Now, the most precious things about his work were stored into his computer and phone.

Exhausted by the flight and the rush of the past few days, Michael closed his eyes.

Slowly, he blocked out every sense telling him where he was – the musty smell, the feel of the bedcover under his palms.

He made his mind black as the vast emptiness of space.

And out of that void, a single picture emerged.

Yes.

Michael had done the right thing, coming here.

Just being in Washington, just thinking that he could get in a cab right now and see the White House, Michael felt much saner, and much more in control of his fate.

He let her stick around in his mind, not trying to feel or touch her, but letting her stand there unrivaled, like a God-appointed monarch reigning over the realm of his fancy.

I would have done anything to save her, if only she had been in need of saving.

If this had been the time of ancient knight stories. If he had been exiled in faraway lands, fighting unambiguous villains who wore the brand of a clear stigma on their foreheads, if only he had been fighting for her, he felt, her absence would have been so much easier to bear.

But she was the one launched into a battle that was raising fire throughout the nation.

She was the one being the change she wanted to see in the world while he waited, wanting her.

Michael opened his eyes. His coat lay next to him on the bed and he searched the pockets for a second until he'd retrieved the origami rose, and placed it on the table, so he could look at it from the bed.

Sometimes, it felt only like a dream to think that he had touched her, that he had ever loved her as anything other than an unreachable worshipped ideal.

He remembered what it had felt like to see her face to face, the last time he had been in Washington, and how it was suddenly unthinkable not to clutch her in his arms and breathe in the smell of her skin.

He sighed, and said to himself, "As long as she can make it, I can take it."

After all.

Eight years wasn't the end of the world.

…

From a black Sedan, through the shielding glass of tinted windows, Kellerman watched as Lincoln Burrows, employee of the year at the Everest, shuffled inside a building. He was accompanied by a man, about his age and built, who Kellerman dismissed entirely.

His whole attention was solely focused on the face of the man whose name had rung such a familiar bell, when he was looking at the employee records from the Everest in his apartment in D. C.

Now, Kellerman knew beyond the shadow of a doubt where and when he had seen that face before.

It was during that whole 'secret lover' scandal, just a week before Sara was elected president.

Lincoln Burrows had been Abruzzi's guy, but he had traded teams and wound up saving Sara's good name in the end.

Kellerman sucked in all the air left in his mouth until his face looked exactly like he had been made to bite into a lemon.

The only thing he could be left to wonder now was, Why?

Why had Lincoln helped Sara in the end? Why would he risk his life for her, double-crossing the Italian mob? Why did he take advantage of his job at the Everest to spy on private conversations and report them to the president?

Was he the secret lover – or did he know him, could he lead Kellerman to him?

"We shall see," Kellerman whispered darkly to his empty car. "We shall see."

…

End Notes: It was a little hard for me to update this fic, as I've spent the whole confinement writing a novel version of it. Now the two versions don't have so much in common, so I thought it'd be hard to get back to the story of the fic where I'd left it. Turns out it wasn't, and I'm full of ideas as to where to take it. Please share your thoughts into the comment section! Take care!