"Come in."

Audrey didn't look up as the door to the liaison office opened but she caught a whiff of perfume and knew that the person entering was a woman. She didn't have to look up to know who it most likely was once that was established. Well, at least she was in her own office now, a bit more of her own territory. "I was wondering how long you would take. So, what will it be? A ruler over the knuckles? Indian burn? Kick in the ass? I care for Jack, I have for a while and I'm being kept from him at one of the worst points in his life by someone using a white coat for a crown."

Winters sat down without being invited to do so, listening at the sharp words from Audrey Raines with a calm born of over a dozen years of hearing the same. She filtered through the word choices; she'd never been compared to corrupt royalty before now. Apparently Raines had authority issues as well, probably having had to grow up with such a powerful father. Raines finally looked at her, about to say something more when Winters folded her hands in her lap and sat back further, giving Raines the look that proverbially left her feeling trapped in a jar. "I'm not here to punish you. That would be an ironic choice of actions, don't you think? I'm here because I wanted to tell you I'm not going to be reporting your little subterfuge against Martha's driver. I would guess you suffered enough getting a glimpse of what you did."

Audrey looked at the wall behind Winters' head, torn for a moment. "I suppose I should thank you." She didn't mention following Curtis to the hallway that led to the safehouse. Three strikes and she would be out, wasn't that the policy? "I am grateful but by the same token, knowing Jack is having episodes like that – whether I should or not, it makes this worse. After this many---."

"Was it entirely the incident you read about or the fact that he settled down immediately when Chloe O'Brian returned?"

"You're that sure he wouldn't have for me?"

"I've never said that. He might respond to you positively in some ways but not the ones that count right now. Tell me, why didn't Jack tell you what was going on when he faked his death and began a new life?"

Audrey's gaze flashed upwards, "To protect me, and to keep me from being used against him or this country."

"Yet he told Agent O'Brian?"

"He needed her to create his new identity and keep making sure that no one ever got a clue that he was still alive. He also had her keep tabs on his daughter. Chloe told me a few days after Palmer was killed that she'd been in touch with him since he'd vanished."

"So -- it would be reasonable to say that he didn't feel the same need to protect Agent O'Brian?"

Audrey stopped her next answer, recognizing the tone. "Am I your patient now?"

"Not exactly but I owe it to Mr. Bauer to understand all the factors that would support his recovery. Based on that - did you want to answer the question?"

"Fine," Audrey snapped and then grimaced at the familiar tone and verbiage. "No, I suppose he didn't feel inclined to protect her in the same way. She's not as public a figure as I can be. She doesn't have a relationship anyone would know about as far as he's concerned."

Winters unclasped her hands and raised them slightly in Raines' direction. "Okay, game over. The reason I wanted to point out to you about your exclusion, and wanted you to realize on your own, is that Jack will lie, will go to extremes, will deprive himself of your relationship – to protect you. He's done it in the past, he would do it again. He would not share with you what he has to share with someone to unlock what's been done to him so that I can get in there and undo the damage. I don't know what they did to him aside from a few things, what I could tell from a physical aspect but to what extent they got inside his head… that has to come from him. He has no history of shutting down with Chloe O'Brian, he does with me and he does with you. Your actions with Walt Cummings, bringing Jack to use force against you, his sacrifice of a supportive relationship to protect you… Ms. Raines, there are very few factors here in your favor from an objective point of view as far as getting to the truth here."

There were tears on Raines face as soon as the other woman finished speaking, whether they were from accepted truth or anger she couldn't tell. The DOD liaison picked up the pile of papers before her and straightened them, a distraction that calmed her and gave her a focus. People's lives still depended on her elsewhere. "All right, just one thing…"

"Yes?"

"Have you done this with a… a… co-worker before, for someone who was attached to someone else?"

"If you're asking will Mr. Bauer come out of this in love with Chloe O'Brian, his actions before now prove that he loves her very deeply already as a friend. He gave up a new life to save hers, risked the very discovery by the Chinese that occurred, but has seen her risk a great deal for him. He's also been through a great deal for you."

"But, of course, I haven't risked as much…"

"The point of your question being - will he want her as more than a friend? I don't have a crystal ball, Ms. Raines, but I have told her explicitly that she should in no way engage in sexual relations with him, not when he's in a radically dependent state. It would amount to not much more than rape no matter who the pursuer was."

Audrey looked away, studied the ceiling, the walls and then the desk before her. "Whatever else I might be unhappy about, I know Chloe would never do anything to hurt Jack or take advantage of him."

"I'll let you think about that, Ms. Raines, and I'll tell you what I can… when it's appropriate."

….

Chloe O'Brian was stalling, she knew it, as much as she wanted to know what the next few hours would reveal she didn't, but she had no choice. Chloe dried the last dish with slow drags and put it back up in the cupboard. The dishes at her own apartment would sit in the sink for three days. The idea of washing them after one meal wouldn't even occur to her. Jack didn't know she washed dishes twice a week but he'd figure out she was stalling, too, soon enough; she had to get this over for both of them.

Grinding her jaw and tossing down the blue dishtowel, she turned to look at Bauer across the breakfast island. She wanted to say something clever, something to make the next step easier to take but she knew there was nothing. Jack met her eyes for a moment then looked away; the color fading from his face, the dark red T-shirt making him look even more pale. She stepped out from the other side of the counter, putting herself in the path of his unfocused gaze. Bauer didn't acknowledge her, didn't respond to her presence but when she extended her hand, he immediately – if slowly – took it in his own. She registered the fact it was shaking and tightened her grip so it shook them both.

Chloe let him lead, let him find the place where he'd be the most comfortable. It was where she would have guessed, to the wide sofa in the living room. He'd opened up to her there before now. She sat down facing him, one leg drawn up on the seat, then let go of his hand and stood up. "I'll be back in second."

She returned as promised, carrying two glasses and a pitcher of cold tea. She had a feeling the next few hours were going to be draining on them both. Jack smiled briefly when she sat down again, knowing she was as unsure of herself as he was. He had to tell her what had happened but she had to get him through it. Bauer finally reached for her hand again after a long moment of nervous but not uncomfortable silence. She took it in two of her own and patted his arm. "We'll go slow."

Jack held her gaze without blinking, and the swallowed tightly, as if he knew he'd crossed some threshold from which he knew there was no going back. "I don't know how to start."

Chloe nodded, "You could tell me from when you were grabbed until Curtis got there or tell me the worst stuff first and get it over with." She turned his hand as she held it and began stroking the inside of his arm, her fingers traveling gently over the scars of needle marks. He needed more prompting, she realized and maybe some clue that she knew a little of what to expect. "The brief said you were really dehydrated when they got you here."

Jack looked up with a touch of surprise. "You saw it?"

"Yeah, it was part of the brief I got after Winters asked me to do this."

He took a sudden deep breath, as if a small burden had been taken from him. "Why don't you tell me what you know?"

Chloe grimaced to herself, for Jack her face remained calm, her voice quiet and steady. "Okay. You were dehydrated but they couldn't tell why, only that you'd been throwing up a lot and there were puncture wounds all over you. Your throat was raw, three ribs were cracked, and you'd been beaten just before we got to you. Your left shoulder was dislocated. You were still nothing but bruises the first time I even saw you and they'd had you off the critical list for a week then. Oh, and you'd lost a lot of blood."

Bauer nodded, watching her fingers stroke the inside of his arm as it rested on his leg, focusing his attention on the feel of it. "Asian culture, especially groups like the Yakuza or their Chinese version, it's all about keeping face, honor, not being disgraced. They told me I was valuable, that they needed me but not why. Whatever value I had they didn't want to acknowledge it or their need for it, so I think I was an embarrassment to them and they wanted the same thing for me." He looked up then, through his lashes, his head still lowered but his eyes focusing on her own as he took the next step. "Their way of keeping me under control, instead of restraints, was to keep me sick. The first day I was there, they did beat me; the second day they took me down to a medical lab, forced a tube down my throat, fed me through it, then injected me with a gastro-intestinal virus, stripped me, and threw me back in my cell. I threw up until there was nothing but blood."

Chloe kept her eyes locked on his, her jaw clenched to keep from reacting, remembering what he'd said days ago, that other people's responses were as hard to take as anything. No wonder he had been so receptive to the simple gesture of bathing him, so grateful that it had blocked out the secondary terror of having nearly been drowned repeatedly. He lowered his head suddenly but just as quickly she reached up and lifted his chin. "How long did they keep you like that?"

"The first week was every other day in and out of the medical lab. They would clean out the cell I was in with cold seawater. I would lay there shivering for the next hour on top of everything else but I was still glad to have them do it." His breaths became shorter and he turned away from her again. This time she let him, watching the tears slide down his face in profile. The only grace was that he now didn't care if she saw them. She thought again about the first few minutes she had had with him, still unconscious, wishing she could simply get him some privacy more than anything else. Her instinct had been right then; physical torture would have been in some ways easier to cope with than humiliation and control. Whoever had held him had known him too well. Chloe watched him a moment more and when she was sure she was in control of herself turned him back toward her.

"That's how you got so dehydrated. What about your shoulder?"

"Twisted it in the chain trying to drag myself out of the ballast tank." A bitter laugh escaped him. "I should have done it the first time. When they knew I couldn't pull myself up, couldn't struggle anymore, they stopped chaining me in there."

Chloe made a quick try at a smile and poured them two glasses of tea. She handed him one and sat back, resting a hand on his leg. "Take a break for a second. I know we're just talking but it's gotta' be hard to think back about this stuff."

"It's almost hard for you to hear it," he replied, half-draining the glass and setting it back carefully on the green coaster protecting the fake wood.

Chloe nodded and glanced out of the window at the nearing darkness. "You had to survive it. Most people wouldn't have."

"Well, there was surviving it and wanting to. I don't think you would have approved of my choice there." He kept his gaze square with O'Brian's and searched her face as she didn't react. "You're supposed to yell at me."

"Enough people have done that, Jack. I'm not gonna judge you. You had no way of knowing if whatever they were doing to you was what the rest of your life was gonna be until they did kill you, or if they were taking you to some Chinese prison."

He accepted her promise with a suddenly exhausted nod, resting the side of his head on the back of the sofa. "I had a lot of reasons to live, Kim, Audrey, you, revenge. All I could think lying there in my own filth was wondering, hoping all of you would have understood if I found a way to die."

She broke then, just a little, the tears burning their way out of her eyes before she could stop or hide them, not because he was wrong but because what he'd said was true. She moved closer to him, resting her knee over his own and not bothering to swipe at the tears, letting him see her take on what she could of his pain and accepting his honesty. Audrey and Kim would have disputed him; but she understood. "I would have known why, Jack. I would have helped Kim know, too."

Bauer lifted his head then, stared into the reddened blue eyes watching his face. The sheer honesty of her answer, even coming from Chloe, caught in his chest. He leaned forward and stroked her face with a trembling hand. "This is why I couldn't do this with anyone else. I don't have to be afraid of the truth with you, whatever it is."

Chloe fought the urge to turn her lips into the hand still stroking her face, hands she'd seen kill now seeming impossibly gentle. It was an easy battle for her; he was the most vulnerable she'd seen him yet, now wasn't the time to listen to the puddle of energy in her gut. "No, Jack, you don't." She took the hand stroking her face and placed the glass of tea in it, steadying his hand as he finished it. The cold untied the knot in his throat and he took an easier breath and calmed.

Chloe sat the glass back on the coaster and took his hand again, stroking the sensitive skin inside of his forearm. She wasn't good at gentle persuasion and certainly had no experience but Jack was different from everyone else. She didn't deal with him by way of confrontation. He was someone she respected, someone she didn't have to confront, who knew his job as well as she knew hers. Her voice dropped to little more than a whisper, her fingers kept trailing the scars from inside of his elbow to his wrist.

"It's okay, Jack, just keep remembering that. You can tell me anything. You don't have to be afraid. Let's finish this and you can rest. You'll have protected me from doing anything wrong. I'm the one who's afraid; I can't hurt you again, okay?"

Bauer nodded, his eyes unfocussed, as she unwittingly drew him to a safer place than she realized, to somewhere outside of who he had been when he was trapped on a freighter bound for death or worse. "They let me recover for a day, and then they locked me in the container and started pounding on it and I told you I ended up sick again. They gave me another day after those two, and then I woke up on a steel table, naked, chained to the corners, and the man who explained everything was there, and the woman who never said anything but she had the needles." He stopped, gathering himself again, his hand shaking now as she held it, still stroking his arm, still drawing him to focus on a gentle touch. Chloe fought down her reaction, her own urge to throw up; she wasn't important now. She had pushed him to this; she had to get him through it.

"How long would that last?"

"I don't know, not long. She knew what she was doing, how to make the pain last, how strong to run the current so there was no permanent damage. They didn't care about not hurting me; they just wanted to be sure I could feel everything next time. It's the waiting, you know? When you're being tortured you know you'll either be dead or at some point it'll be over. It's when they throw you back and you don't know when it'll start again that your mind starts to go. Another few days and I would have told them everything, even what I knew CTU couldn't change. I would have done anything to stop it when I knew they weren't going to kill me but when they knew they'd been found, when the carrier stopped them, they gave me one more good beating as long as they could."

Chloe dropped her head at last, breaking eye contact with him. She was strong but not bottomless. The tears dropped onto her thin gray sweat pants, onto the bosom of her white long-sleeved top. She was almost successful in biting back the sob but as she did she felt the impossible, Jack's arms around her as she cried, his own tears chilling the back of her neck. She held onto him and calmed as he rocked her and slowly relaxed, reordering her priorities, changing her own internal protocols but long minutes passed before she let go of his arm and straightened, sniffing, to look him in the eye. She gathered herself again, one more thing – they'd both survive it, just like her telling him that she would have defended his suicide to his child.

"Winters said there was one thing to find out, not meaning I'm going to tell her, but that it would be important to know so that you could deal with it, accept it, I don't know." She felt the blood rushing to her already flushed and hot face. "I wouldn't ask but she kept on about how it was impor-- … that women in the field sort of accept it as a risk but guys aren't… aren't pre---."

"I wasn't raped, Chloe. My God, how did you have courage to ask?" He took hold of her face again, staring at her with pure amazement that left no room for embarrassment. "There were times when she, when the woman who was there, used the needles… there. I suppose that qualifies as sexual assault but not…"

"Not that. Okay. I'm sorry. I was told I should find out when you were ready, even if only you deal with it. Winters told me before I got here that she knew I wouldn't tell her anything you didn't want... so… Crap."

Bauer nodded, smiling and was suddenly too tired to even keep up the smile but with the exhaustion came a sudden freedom, a demon slain, a burden halved. If he shared what had happened with no one else, he had shared it with Chloe and his secrets were as safe as if he'd held them himself. He wiped a hand over his eyes, and fell on his side against the back of the couch. She saw he was as spent as the first day they'd brought him here; where they touched she could feel him now shaking with exhaustion.

Chloe stood up long enough to move to the end of the sofa, dropping a pillow into her lap and catching Jack's eye with a small, inviting smile. He turned where he sat, backing into her arms, his head coming to rest against her breasts. He was asleep in seconds, an almost smile on his face. She watched him until she knew there would be no nightmares this night, none, of course, unless she counted her own.