In some dreams that I've had, the world seems so much more peaceful, like a world within a dream should be. Those dreams, sadly, are within the minority of dreams that I've had ever since Teri died, and the dreams that are most common are the worst of all. Those dreams take place in the world I live in.
Noone, at that particular moment in time, could have blamed Jack Bauer if he had let out the loudest, most primal, most anguished yell that he could physically create, but in that moment in time, Jack Bauer was silent. The only sounds that flowed through the tiny room were the occasional drip of a tear as it reached the cold, grey floor.
This dream, this is the most common. It's the moment between finding my dead wife where her killer had left her, and before someone found me kneeling next to her with my eyes so blurred by tears that I could barely see past my own nose. You would think that such a common dream, such a recurring dream, would lose it's effect over the course of two decades, but it doesn't. It just gets worse, it just gets more realistic and I'm afraid of waking up one day and finding myself kneeling there again, Teri's body lying on the floor in front of me.
As someone walked past the room, the door being slightly ajar, Jack glanced up as the soft beat of rubber on concrete rose then fell in volume. He guessed that it was a man, probably one of the security guards wondering where he was, but Jack didn't want to be seen or found. He just wanted to stay there with Teri, dreading the moment when he would have to turn his back on her, the moment he would have to walk through that door, down the corridor and into the bullpen where his colleagues were. Where Kim was.
I don't know if Kim has dreams of that night, but I hope she doesn't. I would give anything to be the only one who has his dreams, because god knows that she's suffered so much since that day, and I know I'm partly to blame. I remember the look on her face as I turned into the bullpen, a look of anxiety and tiredness and hope. She was expecting Teri to be with me, and I don't think she even considered that her mother was dead until I sat her down in the conference room and delivered those words to her. If you had seen it as a script, like for a play, it seems so easy out of context, but in reality it was the hardest god-damn thing I've ever had to do. A sympathetic hand shaking slightly as it held her own hand, an attempt not to cry in front of my daughter, and a few words croaked out. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but your mother's dead. I'm sorry, but your mother's dead, and she was killed by someone I trusted, she trusted, you trusted. I'm sorry.
The first person who found Jack was Tony, and he didn't even notice him enter the room until he whispered Jack's name. The widowed agent looked up at him and nothing needed to be said. Nothing wanted to be said at that point. He looked around the room and anyone who knew Tony could tell that he was thinking of Nina as well as Teri. Jack remembered that moments before he had found my wife, he had almost killed Nina, and if Jack had known that she had killed Teri, nothing would have stopped him from killing Nina in the parking lot. Nothing.
I didn't see Nina for some weeks after that night, and the first meeting was in a court room, where her trial was just beginning. Our eyes seemed destined to meet as soon as they could, and I couldn't see the Nina I had loved at all in the creature who stood handcuffed on the other side of the room. Kim was there as well, determined to watch as her mother's killer was tried, and I could hear her try so desperately not to cry in front of mother's murderer. Except that Nina's eyes wandered over to me, caught Kim staring at her and Kim began to silently cry. That moment broke what was left of my heart.
As he carried Teri slowly out of the room – he had insisted, and noone was going to deny Jack that last journey, because he was determined to make that last moment last as long as possible – Jack hoped that Kim would not suddenly appear and see her dead mother, blood covering most of her chest, her skin greying. He knew it would take a few minutes to get to the morgue, and each footstep seemed like a mile. Not that Jack wanted to get to the morgue too soon, anyway.
She had been given life without parole, which meant that she supposedly would be behind bars for the rest of her life, but I knew from the moment that I saw my dead wife, the moment that I broke the news to my daughter, the moment we buried Teri next to her parents, that Nina wouldn't stay in jail for too long. I could tell that she had ways of getting out of jail, and when I saw those photographs of her on the day we exiled her to North Africa, I knew that she would be free once more. The day had been another ordeal that scarred us all mentally and physically, and I still sometimes regret that I stopped Nina from carrying out my murder. Selfish as it may seem, death at that point would have been perfect – I knew that CTU would be able to find the bomb, and I knew that Nina would be far away from my daughter. However, I also knew that I couldn't abandon Kim, that I couldn't just let Nina defeat me so easily.
As Jack laid Teri's body down gently on the gurney, he wiped his eyes and looked at her face. The warmth had gone, and as Jack stroked her cheek gently, he tried not to remember her as a corpse, but as a human being full of life. It took a mention of Kim to make him realise that he had to go to his daughter, and as he reluctantly whispered his goodbyes, and as he performed the dreaded act of turning his back on her body, he told himself that things were going to be OK. At that point in time, they couldn't get much worse.
Hours after I had killed Nina, and shortly after ridding the world of the last Cordilla dose, I had visited Nina in the morgue, and I was confused. This was a woman who had destroyed my life, who had almost killed me and my daughter multiple times, yet as I stood there I felt as if I was going to miss her. As I stroked her cool cheek in much the same fashion as I had done with Teri, I felt sorrow. My actions that morning were almost like a purge of the monster, removing what had captured my former friend and lover's self in it's malicious, blood thirsty claws. If only I could have done that in a way that didn't kill her.
Waking up from the latest dream, Jack sighed audibly, before looking over at the alarm clock. Noticing that it was barely past three in the morning, he instictively yawned. Sitting up in the bed, he saw that the curtains had not been drawn, and so he could see Munich asleep. The purple clouds lazily floated above, the moon casting a silvery ghost down onto the city where Jack now hid from two governments. It had been much easier to slip into Germany than it had been to slip out of the United States, and now he was here he had no idea what he was supposed to do next.
I still remember with perfect clarity, and with the same tone she had used, the last words Teri spoke to me. They can bring me great comfort, and they can bring me great sadness, but the important thing is that they survive. A lot like me, I suppose.