chapter two

If Chloe had ever imagined Jack carrying her in his arms into his apartment, it certainly wasn't under these circumstances. The dull and sharp aches alternating throughout her body prevented her from feeling anything other than pain despite the tender presence of the only person who had cared enough to chase after her when she fled, save her when she drove into a ditch at double the speed limit, and carry her to safety when they both knew she could have walked. She wondered if she was worthy of this kind of care, unaware that in his eyes, no mistake she could have made would have stopped him from caring for her and doing everything in his power to look after. Others may have judged her and pointed the finger at her mistake, placing the blame and the consequences on her, but they had never been where he had been. He knew the look in Chloe's eyes all too well, and he despised that they were now bonded by the shared experience of this kind of self-blame. It was an experience he would wish on nobody.

He carried her to the couch in his modest sitting room, lying her down before turning to close the door and flip the lights on. When the room was illuminated she looked around the apartment surrounding her, surprised to find it nearly immaculate. She never would have thought to tag Jack Bauer a neat freak, but the perfectly organized and spotless minimalist furniture and the dustless surfaces begged to differ. Her eyes found a bookcase that leaned against the bright white wall to her left, each of its many books organized alphabetically and by subject. Something else she wouldn't have pegged him as was a World War II history buff, but she was again corrected by the bookcase's revelatory contents.

Chloe propped up her back against the arm of the couch behind her when Jack appeared with a first aid kit in tow. She was relieved to feel something other than pain when a slightly antsy feeling took over as he sat opposite to her on the couch and took one of her bruised legs into his hands. She crossed her arms against her chest and ignored the jitters, searching for something, anything, to say.

"This place is really...clean," she muttered, watching as an amused grin was shown in response. She tried to reciprocate but couldn't, the idea of forming a smile seeming obscene somehow. A touch of antiseptic was applied to a cut that ran across her right ankle, prompting a small cry in response.

"Sorry," he quickly replied, covering the cut with a piece of gauze.

She pursed her lips and felt a sudden twitch of discomfort as he switched to her other leg. "You don't have to do this, you know," she said, garnering no reaction from him as he studiously examined another cut, a larger one. "I'm sure you hate me like everybody else does, and just so you know, I don't blame you."

"Nobody hates you, Chloe," he replied, meeting her eyes before swabbing the cut with more antiseptic.

This time she didn't feel the sting. "I do."

He again looked up at her and opened his mouth to speak but fell short of the right words. He knew there were no right words, not when she was this raw. Really, he didn't know if there would ever be any right words, only the dulling effect of time.

He closed the kit and set it on the floor next to his feet, leaning forward on the edge of the cushion under him with his elbows on his knees before taking a breath and speaking. "Chloe..."

"Save your breath, Jack," she quickly interrupted. "I know what you're going to say, and it's not going to make a difference, so don't."

He looked down to his feet and ignored his instinct to argue in favor of what he knew to be true. "I know."

She paused at the depth of his voice, knowing the feeling and the experience that was behind it. Many times before the roles had been reversed and it was Jack who had struggled with the consequences of his actions, and it was Chloe who would try to convince him that he had made the right calls, but now she understood why he never seemed to listen or even try to believe her.

He turned his head towards hers and spoke softly. "Curtis and I were a lot alike. It was never hard to work with him," he said as she cast her eyes down. "We had a lot of the same instincts. He always followed his gut, always did whatever was necessary, and was usually a lot more rational than I ever was, but..." His eyes narrowed and pulled hers back into his gaze. "He would have gone into that situation with or without you. You were the only chance he had of making it out at all."

"I could have told Buchanan what he was doing. I had a million chances to stop what happened, Jack."

"You don't know that," he argued softly.

"Yes, I do, okay?" she snapped, her eyes too worn to produce tears. A dry numbness replaced the urge to cry. "I told you, nothing you say is going to change anything."

"Listen to me," he said with more force to his voice as he turned and moved in closer. "Nobody understands what you're feeling right now better than I do, Chloe, nobody. And I promise you, once you go down this road, there is no turning back. You can either accept that some things, and some people, are beyond your control, or you can let this eat at you until there's nothing left."

By the look in his eyes she knew that he had chosen the latter more than once. "This wasn't out of my control. I really wish it was, but all I had to do was-"

"It was an impossible decision, Chloe," he interrupted, his tone giving away that he was trying to convince himself as much as he was her. "Don't you know how easily the same thing could have happened to me? Do you think I'd blame anybody but myself if it did?"

The thought wasn't comforting. "Well, on the bright side, I guess nobody has to worry about that anymore. I'm sure Buchanan will personally make sure I never step foot inside CTU again, not that he has to."

Jack paused and looked away, her mention of Bill's outburst instantly raising his ire. He would deal with Bill later. "I should have stood up for you. I'm sorry. He was in shock. We all were."

Her mind briefly wandered to her future, reality setting in that she was going to have to start over yet again, that her life had been uprooted and thrown unwillingly into its next chapter. It only made her head pound even harder than it already was. "I still can't believe it," she muttered, her voice hitching with emotion that hurt all the more from her inability to release it.

Jack sensed her pain and leaned back into the couch, reaching out and meeting a tired lack of resistance when he pulled her into his arms and held her head against his chest. She closed her eyes and settled into him, so exhausted that curling up with him on a barely accommodating couch didn't give her one second of pause. He was warm and encompassing, setting her mind at ease just long enough to close her eyes as the world around her stilled and fell silent to the heartbeat ticking softly in her ear. A deep breath escaped her throat, and she slowly drifted away to a place she hoped could be a refuge from the new normal that awaited her on the other side.

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He didn't know how much time had passed as she slept soundly in his arms, and he was afraid to move her for fear of waking her. He also knew there would be no sleep for himself tonight, not after everything that had happened. And there was one last thing he had to do before he could allow his mind to take a rest.

Careful not to shift her weight too much from her current position, he managed to struggle off of the couch with her still in his arms without disturbing her sleep. Breathing a sigh of relief, he dropped a kiss on the top of the head that rested against his shoulder and carried her to his bedroom.

After tucking her into his bed and underneath his sheets he lingered over her for a moment, reaching down and brushing her hair away from her face before releasing a sigh and turning to leave. Reluctantly he left her and pulled his cell phone from the pocket of his jeans and let his lips curve into the scowl he had been reserving for this moment since Chloe had fallen asleep.

As the line rang on the other end he closed the bedroom door behind him and left the hallway for the sitting room, where he paced until a clearly freshly woken voice answered.

"Buchanan," Bill answered as the still very-awake Karen stirred next to him.

"Bill, it's Jack," he replied, the words so oft-repeated he didn't know how to say them in a way that would channel the anger he intended to.

"Jack, what's going on?" Bill asked, the previous times Jack had called him in the middle of the night always signaling the onslaught of another crisis.

"I'll tell you what's going on," Jack seethed. "Chloe was in an accident tonight. She was driving at double the speed limit, swerved to avoid a car, and drove into a ditch where she totaled her car. I watched it happen."

"My God, is she alright?" Bill asked, sitting up and flipping on the light on the nightstand beside the bed. Karen followed, watching his face give away the nature of the news. After listening to his account of what had happened that night, she could guess who the "she" was, and she wasn't surprised.

"No, Bill, she's not alright. What the hell were you thinking?"

Bill closed his eyes and tried to brush off his words. "Listen, just tell me what hospital she's in, and I'll-"

"She's not in a hospital, Bill. She's here."

"In your apartment?"

"Yes, in my apartment. She refused to let me take her to a hospital," he replied, softening his tone for his next words. "Dammit, Bill, she needed her friends to stand behind her tonight, not humiliate her in front of every single person inside of CTU. You have no idea what you did to her."

"I didn't have a choice, Jack, she crossed a line, and I lost one of my best agents as a result."

"And she lost one of her best friends as a result.", Jack countered. "You don't think she doesn't understand that? You don't think this isn't going to haunt her for the rest of her life?"

Jack listened as silence filled the other end, a silence that proved he had made his point. "Listen, Jack...I'm glad you're taking care of her, but I don't know what it is you think I can do."

"You can understand, Bill. And you can give her a second chance. She deserves a lot better than this, and you know that. You should be thanking her for the time she's given CTU when you know as well as I do that she could be making triple what she's paid by tomorrow. It's your loss, Bill, not hers."

Bill began to respond, but a sound coming from down the hall pierced Jack's ears and forced the blood flowing through his veins to run ice cold. "I'll call you back," Jack muttered, dropping the phone and running out of the sitting room and down the hallway, bursting into his bedroom to find Chloe in the grips of what was sure to be the first of many nightmares.

He rushed to her side and climbed into the bed, calling her name as he pulled her into his arms and tried not to let himself break at the sound of her voice crying jumbled words and the sight of her body jerking against its own will without regard to her injuries. On his knees, he tried to pull Chloe to hers as he clasped her forearms in his hands to stop them from flying about aimlessly.

"Chloe," he called as her eyes remained clenched shut, "Chloe, wake up, come on...please, Chloe, wake up." He called her name over and over as she began to find her way back to reality from the darkness that had engulfed her mind and threatened to not let go. His voice grew hushed as her eyes stirred and finally opened and the movements of her limbs came to a full halt. She looked around the room and to the light shining from the hallway through the open door, then back to him. The nightmare was over, but the terror that it brought was still there, only enhanced by the realization that she had awoken to the same world she had fallen asleep in. He watched her eyes fill with tears and quickly took her back into his arms, rocking her slightly as he whispered words of comfort into her ear. Her arms wrapped around him and gripped the fabric of his shirt into her fists as she pressed her face into his shoulder and wept harder than she ever had in her life. He tried to hide the fact that tears of his own had begun to flow, telling himself to get a grip and be the rock that she needed right now, but it was no use. He didn't realize what a significant place she held in his heart until it broke for her.

When her breaths eased and her grips softened, he sniffed away his emotion and eased her back down on the bed, pulling the covers back and crawling under them with her. The dim light from the hallway captured the shine in his eyes for a moment, showing his tears to Chloe before he pulled her close to him. They lay facing one another for a moment, his one arm holding her while the other's hand wiped her tears from her face and softly caressed her cheek. Her hand reached to cover his, and her eyes closed as she settled into the crook of his neck and the protection of his arms. He felt like a home away from home, the comfort he provided somehow enough to stop he pounding in her head and aching in her heart, if only for those few moments before she drifted back to sleep.

Jack stared into the ceiling above them until he could keep his eyes open no longer, giving into the desire for sleep that he thought would never come. The world and the nightmares that awaited in it could wait until morning.