"How bad do these hurt?" Jack asks, his hand travelling up to my fingers.
"Not too bad…"
"C'mon. Let's get them treated."
"Don't worry about it, Jack." I don't do typing or anything that will require direct use of the pads of my fingers, so there's no reason to baby them.
"Humor me," he says. He tugs me to my feet and leads me into the bathroom.
The master bathroom is the worst room in the house. I haven't cleaned it in a month. The trash can's overflowing. Hair, dirt and the occasional smudge of toothpaste line the sink and counter. What isn't visible, at least, is the black ring in the toilet and the brown ring in the bathtub, which is blocked by the shower curtain.
Jack pays the mess no heed. I'm impressed. He turns on the tap and puts my fingers under the cold running water. I hiss at first contact, and feel his eyes lock on me. After a minute or two, though, the water starts to numb the skin, and I relax.
"Where's your first aid kit? In here?" He lowers the knob to stop the flow of water.
"I'm sure it'll be fine," I say.
"The water burned skin off," Jack says, looking critically at my fingers. He reaches for the towel, but it's not on the bar. It's on the floor. It's probably been rotting there for a week… He blinks, and smoothly pats my fingers dry with the bottom of his shirt instead.
Our eyes meet when he looks up, dropping the end of his shirt. He continues to hold my fingers, watching me. It's strange…I never noticed how blue his eyes are…
Something startles me out of our little staring contest, and I realize that he's just waiting patiently for me to tell him where I keep the damn first aid kit. Looking away, I mutter, "It's in a box under the sink."
She doesn't appreciate me telling her what to do. That much is blatantly obvious. I rummage through the box and pull out a plastic first aid kit, a transparent blue plastic with a red cross on either side. "Will you rub Neosporin on those for me?" I ask.
Renee looks surprised for a moment, but then she says, "Okay." She takes the tube from my hands, unscrews the lid, and rubs several tiny portions over her burned flesh.
I pretend to be preoccupied with the kit, so she doesn't think I asked her to do that just so she feels like she has some resemblance of control over her life. Which, I did… "Here's the gauze…" I say as she caps the tube. I hold up the smallest roll. "May I?"
After a second of hesitation, she nods. I carefully isolate one finger and start rolling the gauze around it, and then I cut, tape, and repeat with the next finger. I work slowly, but not inefficiently. I want to prolong my visit, because I don't know if she'll let me in next time, but I don't want to be obvious about it either.
She stares at her freshly-bandaged fingers. "I'm not sure, but those could be borderline second-degree burns…" I say. I want to recommend that she goes to a doctor. When I was a little kid, my mom took Graem to the hospital when he spilled a boiling pot of spaghetti noodles and burned his feet; those were second-degree burns. Our cook, Cassie, was fired on the spot. Somehow I always felt sorrier for her than for Graem, who wasn't supposed to be fooling around in the kitchen anyway, and knew it.
But I can't say she should go to a doctor. She and I have both seen and or suffered far worse than a few borderline burns on a couple of fingers. Hopefully her pride won't allow her to go to the hospital, because if it doesn't, that means that at least part of her cares about herself. Not her body – bodies heal – but her mind, her personality.
"If you start to see pus, you should get a doctor to prescribe something stronger," I say lamely. "Infected burns get nasty."
She does seem to be appalled at the idea. Her lips purse unhappily. "Yeah," she says in a noncommittal tone.
Well, I suppose that's as much as I can expect.
I hear a faint beeping coming from outside the bedroom. "Um, I think that's the coffee," I say.
"Lead the way," he murmurs, and I quietly do.
I grab two mugs from a mostly-bare cabinet and pour. "I don't have cream or sugar."
"That's fine. I usually drink it black anyway."
We sip the coffee quietly for a moment. Then I'm talking before I realize it. "What am I supposed to do?"
He studies me. "Live," he says. "You take the life you tore apart, and you stitch it back together whether you want to or not."
You'd expect my next question to be "How?" but it's not. To even my surprise, I ask, "Why?"
It's a good question. Why? Why do I live? Why should I get to live, when others have died because of me? When lives were destroyed because of things I've done? Somewhere in D.C., there's a baby boy without a father, and a disabled woman without her sister. And that's just what I did six months ago.
"Why?" Jack says. "When other people fall down, they have the luxury of giving in to their own permanent hell if they want to. You and I, when we fall, we have to pick ourselves back up. Not because CTU needs us, or the FBI needs us, or the country needs us, but because that's who we are. That's what we do. We pick ourselves up."
"I think my fall paralyzed me, to continue your quaint little metaphor," I mutter. I take a large swallow of coffee without blowing on it; the hot liquid burns my tongue, mouth and my throat.
Suddenly, he cups my cheek. "You're not paralyzed, Renee," he says softly. "You're just stunned from the impact."
I never thought myself to be poetic, but my comments to her today seem to be largely of the cheesy poetic variety. But, she hasn't kicked me out yet, so something's working. I try to give her a tender smile.
Renee looks down and walks away, to the kitchen window. Well…I can honestly say I've never had this reaction, and I'm not even trying to seduce her. I follow, but stop short a foot behind her. "Renee?" I say, cautiously. She doesn't reply. "Renee?"
"Yeah?" Her voice…it sounds so vulnerable. I feel my chest starting to ache – damn, if she wasn't right. I do have a thing for rescuing people.
"What is it?"
"Why are you here?" she asks.
I'm sure I've answered that before. I pinch my palm before saying, "Because you need help, and I care."
"Why do you care?" It comes out as a whisper. "No one else cares about me. I don't even care about me."
I take her by the shoulders, and turn her around. Her body is pliant and obedient without pause, completely unlike the Renee I remember. "I care because I remember how amazing you were that day," I say. "Because I know that Renee Walker is still in there somewhere, and I want to see her again."
Her eyes move subtly from left to right as she stares into my eyes, and before I can stop her, she grabs my head with both hands and crushes her lips to mine.