Hi, everyone! This is my first Chloe-Jack fic EVER. I've started watching the show two months ago, I've only watched the first three seasons and I am know watching season 4, but I've read about the events that took place during the course of seasons 5, 6 and 7, so I know how Chloe and Jack's lives are like right now. This fic came to me today while I was trying to study for a Math test, and it wouldn't stop bothering me until I wrote it down. It's just a little oneshot based on my thoughts about a very fluffy Jack Bauer missing a woman he once had but that he had to let go because he truly wanted her to be happy. Hope you like it! Please, review. All constructive critics are welcomed!
Love will be the death of him.
Not the terrorist, not his enemies, not the people whose hatred he has earned with the course of his years working at CTU. No: love will be the death of him. It sounds clich , yes, and he is aware of that. It sounds really un-Bauer, yes, and he is aware of that too. But he is also aware of it being the plain and simple truth.
The simplest one.
Of all the women he has been with and/or fallen in love with, she is the one who has found her own way to confuse him and keep him awake for hours and hours without even trying, without even knowing that she does.
But truth be told, he likes it. If he is to be sleepless, he rather spend the whole night without being able to fall asleep and thinking over and over again about her instead of laying awake with his thoughts wandering dark places, darker memories than the ones he's got of her.
He loves dreaming of her during the few hours his brain allows him to sleep. He loves dreaming of her voice, her eyes, her skin, her lips, her taste so vividly that for a moment the whole dream confuses him and leads him to think she is there with him and not in her husband's arms.
Truth be told, he is happy for her. He is happy because he knows she's given the chance she's always wanted and deserved. He knows she's better off without him. He knows he would have never been able to give her everything she needs and deserves, simple because the truth is that everyone who has ever gotten close to him has ended up dead, hurt or terribly destroyed.
And he would have never fogiven himself if something like that had happened to her, so the moment he saw how dangerously close they had gotten to each other, he let her go. He pushed her away and asked her not to insist on that desicion being the wrong one because his mind was not to be changed.
Truth be told, he is miserable, yes, but at least he is happy because he once had her and because he loved her so much and with such intensity he was able to stop things from going further. He let her go just in time, he kept her from getting hurt by the ones who would have done anything in order to destroy him through the ones he cared about.
And truth be told, he doesn't regret it. He is in pain, yes, he knows love will be the death of him because it hurts a lot not having her with him anymore, it hurts knowing that she went back to Morris' arms, but at least she will be safer with that man.
He loves Chloe, he misses her, he wishes things would have been different, but he doesn't regret any of the things he's done.
He doesn't regret loving her, because if he's to die, then he wants love to be the death of him.