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A howl pierces unmistakably through gen pop. In Fox River, Michael has found that silence is imaginary, a concept that doesn’t and reasonably shouldn’t exist in the wild. When there isn't laughing, there's snoring. When there isn't snoring, there's shouting, yelling, the sound of a steel blade slicing cleanly through flesh— which would almost be unnoticeable if Michael hadn’t been too wary not to listen out for it. But he can't say he had been expecting howling at this time of the night, of all things: Fox River is the carnal, primal depth of the wildest of wilds, but surely not in the natural-order sense.
He sits up in his bunk. The howl repeats, ricochets, reverberates from more cells, faster, louder, in different tones. All of them spill in through Michael's cell in the shadows on the floor, the shadows which can’t reach him so long as he stays atop his perch on the bed.
If the wolves are caged, surely he has nothing to worry about. There’s a physical barrier between him and the carnage outside.
He leans back against the concrete behind him, shivering at the cold rush from the wall against his scalp for a second. Other inmates are yelling at them to shut up. Michael can't sleep in this state, not yet adapted to the noise. Sucre, meanwhile, is snoring peacefully through every whoop and jeer.
Wolves are predators. They kill for a reason. The same couldn't be said for any of the inmates howling in this prison. There are wolves in sheep's clothing, and there are men in wolves’ clothing, wearing those coarse grey hairs proudly like anything of what they did was necessary. Like they had no other choice.
Michael stares across at the blank wall of the cell, counting the imperfections and storing them loosely in the back of his mind. T-Bag had that leering smile, jaws like a predator, eyes with acid that could strip the skin from your bones, but he didn't pretend. He knew he was a monster beyond nature's creation, and he took pride in that. In a way, it was more respectable than these howlers in the night, taking their claim to a biology that far preceded the darkness festering in their souls.
When T-Bag pounces, it’s human. His thumbs bruise, opposable. The sound of his voice doesn’t mimic anything, it doesn’t howl nor shriek. But he speaks, and the worst part about words is that they’re the materialisation of thoughts. They resonate, paint vivid, detailed images of all the pain he wants to cause. There’s no mistaking them.
It’s so fittingly T-Bag, smooth and drawling, but even when he’s pretending to be a friend, it’s with an even more calculated cruelty than wolves in the night, and there’s this dark glint in his eyes like a rusty, flickering lighter that tells Michael he knows exactly the type of person he is.
The sound of howling resonates, carries through the empty halls outside until it's all that there is to listen to, until the yells are just another ringing in Michael's ears. Maybe one day the ringing will wane to a gentle humming in the back of his mind, they day he’ll grow accustomed to the harsher noises in the cell block. Hopefully he won’t have to.
From where Michael sits on his bunk, he can see through the cages of his own cell, the balcony, and all the way down on the lowest layer in the pit where T-Bag is sitting. He’s unafraid, annoyed, but awake nonetheless. Even the most depraved criminals are stirring.
It’s dark in the cell block. It couldn’t be earlier than midnight. Michael can still see the flicker of T-Bag’s dark gaze up to him, smoke lulling from the depths of his eyes and filling gen pop with a black haze. There are raging forest fires and then there are the artificial ones. Arson, evil that brings with it the smell of paraffin and the taste of butane, equally as uncontrollable.
Meeting Michael’s eyes, T-Bag cracks a smile, lust-stained and blunt, that ripples his skin. His cellmate, his pocket-holder, is still asleep when T-Bag stands from his cell to clutch the bars with every digit on his hands, eyes searing deep into him, gunmetal black and reactive like a trigger loose from too many years of fire.
His wraith-like figure stands unmoving compared to the rest of the hollering around them. That’s what T-Bag is. A ghost. Human, but dead. A monster, already too far gone. In a prison full of wolves, lions and sheep, T-Bag is his own, special brand of devil. He’s in control, aware of his own depravity and alert to every shadow that creeps up into every concrete crack at night.
T-Bag runs this prison because he knows his limitless ferocity and he simply doesn’t care. He has no cause, no reason. His black hatred is directed and inexcusable, irredeemable and irreparable. Unlike the other animals in here, T-Bag has no excuse and he doesn’t want one.
When Michael had first been sent to Fox River, he saw animalistic fury and degeneration everywhere he looked. He saw feral wolves and rabid dogs, and when he saw T-Bag, he saw the worst of them all.
But ironically, in the darkness of the night, under the howling of the wolves and the obscurity of exhaustion, he can see the humanity in T-Bag’s eyes. The impenitent, loathing perversion of humanity.