Summary: They looked into each other's eyes, and wondered where they were. (Conclusion to Day 2 and the Liz/Tony/Michelle triangle that has been set upon me by Howard Gordon and The Powers That Be.)
Spoilers: To be safe, the whole freakin' show.
Standard disclaimers apply.
Original Character Bio: Liz Rycoff is CTU Los Angeles's Chief of Technology. She survived the first day and remained with CTU. She's best friends with Jack, but he shut even her out of his life following the events of the first day. Her other close friend is Mason, but obviously now he's no longer with us. Liz and Tony sort of, kind of dated between Seasons 1 and 2, but it's a failed relationship, and was from the start.
Dedication: This one's for Carlos Bernard, whose Tony has emerged as a kick-ass hero in Season 2.
Recommended Listening: "Anywhere" by Evanescence
It was eight-ten a.m., eighteen months after the California Presidential primary.
Everything was over now, or getting there. People were beginning to close down their workstations and take very deep breaths. They were scared, so mortified; what if something happened in two seconds, two minutes, and it all happened again? The fear in their hearts motivated them to either sit in their chairs, staring off into space for an interminable silence, or carefully, almost reverently excavate themselves from the ruins and try to make their way home. Their brains hadn't rationalized anything that had happened today yet. That would come later, somewhere at two a.m. tomorrow in the middle of their sleep, when they'd wake up in a stunned state and not know why.
Elisabeth Rycoff was not at her desk, staring off, and she wasn't trying to remember where she'd parked her car after all such minor details had been sucked out of her brain. She was standing in the remains of the CTU break room, simply standing there taking everything in. She knew the feelings they felt, this being the second time around for her, and she knew a pain beyond that. By all rights, she should have been one of the first ones out the double doors. Liz had risked her life in the bomb blast in a futile attempt to save Paula Schaeffer, had thereafter collapsed and almost died, and had seen one of her oldest friends, George Mason, slowly deteriorate and then sacrifice himself for a greater good she'd always known was in him, while her other closest friend, Jack Bauer, had finally come back into her life a totally different person. Despite all the trauma, Liz's world didn't work like anyone else's. She was the first one in, last one out, and it would always be that way. Maybe that was Jack's fault.
Outside on the CTU floor, acting Special Agent In Charge Tony Almeida disengaged himself from the action on the floor and went looking for her. He knew she would be somewhere, keeping to herself, internalizing everything as she always did for a greater good. Of all the people who had been through this day and the day eighteen months before, short of perhaps Bauer and Mason themselves, Liz had come into two of the worst days of anyone. He, of all people, who had come to a sort of half-understanding of what made her dedicated mind operate, and who had come to realize the broken heart behind the tough façade, knew this woman he'd come to count on as an ally and a friend and a … He knew she shouldn't be alone. None of them should be alone, but especially not Liz, not now, not today. He quietly walked into the break room, noticing the infinite sadness in her eyes through her reflection off the ruined table – a sadness she'd never let herself feel until today.
After a moment, she turned around and the two of them looked at each other, an eye contact charged with the unique feelings of two people who had known each other for what seemed like years and who, in mutually having their lives ripped apart, had been put into a desperate position with each other. They'd been thrown together, both needing someone to turn to stronger than themselves, to be told everything would be okay, to put reality back into the frame. They had mistaken those needs for other, more emotional needs, and now they knew it wasn't so. Yet Tony's thoughts never once went back to Michelle Dessler in the other room. He was remembering the rare moments where he'd held Liz and she had opened up to him, as much as she opened up to anyone who wasn't Jack or George, and how he felt he owed her something. As for Liz herself, she was thinking how it came to be that she could have an ally like Tony and they could end up like this, in this tangle of crossed wires, conflicting emotions, and foundering humanity. It did not seem to be a fate good enough for him. She thought nothing of herself.
What were they supposed to say?
*Dear my love, haven't you wanted to be with me
And dear my love, haven't you longed to be free
I can't keep pretending that I don't even know you
And at sweet night, you are my own*
"Liz, you…"
"Tony." Her voice was almost resigned to her harsh fate. "Don't say it."
"I want to say it." He knew if he didn't take a stand here, he never would. "You are an incredible person, and we couldn't have done what we did out there today without you."
"Without anyone," she corrected. "Every one of us, we made a difference today."
"Why do you always do that?"
"Do what?" she said, now glancing at him suspiciously. No one had ever really corrected her on much of anything, least of all Tony Almeida. She'd always been somewhat of a free agent, living under the auspice of two great men. But that had changed today; everything had changed again today.
Tony looked at her, into her, and through her. "Always refuse to take credit for anything."
"I don't…"
"Yeah, you do. Mason wants to promote you, you won't do it. Jack can compliment you, but you always turn it back on him. Liz, things can be about you. You're allowed to be a person, you know." His voice had a certain conviction to it. Somebody needed to say something, and he was now the one left to say it.
"No, I'm not." Her response surprised him, to say the least. "After some of the things I've done…"
Tony couldn't believe what he was hearing. "You're one of the best, Liz. You're one of the reasons this build … this organization is still standing."
"I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about what I've said, what I've done … to other people, and to you." She took a long breath, as if the emotional weight of their entire past was hitting her again, and he closed the distance between the two of them and grabbed her by the shoulder, forcing her to look into his eyes. The sensation of personal physical contact between them almost felt alien to her.
He spoke
with as much commitment as he'd ever spoken about anything in his life. "You
never did anything to me," he said, reaching out and taking her hand as he'd
seen Jack often do to her. "Nothing that I'd ever regret."
*Take my hand
We're leaving here tonight
There's no need to tell anyone
They'd only hold us down
So by the morning's light
We'll be halfway to anywhere
Where love is more than just your name*
"How can you be sure?" she said, as if her brain was still trying to understand what he was saying to her. How long had it been since someone had said these words or something like them? "Tony, you and Michelle deserve to be happy. To get the hell out of here and move on. You need to forget about me."
"I can't do that." He paused, choosing his next words carefully. "It might not have been all sunshine and roses, Liz, but something happened between us. Did it ever come to anything? No, but who cares about that? It was part of our lives. We went out to dinner, and we talked, and we went driving, and we spent time together. We went through an experience together. That's part of the good thing about life. You care about people and you give up part of your life to them and you don't apologize for it." Studying her, Tony couldn't help but ask, "I felt like everything would be okay, Liz. Maybe not perfect, maybe I wasn't thrilled, but you got me standing back here again. When was the last time you ever felt like that?"
"Eighteen months and a day ago." With those words, the memories came back into her mind, and she flinched involuntarily. Inside, though she'd never admit it, she would give everything to turn back time and avert all that had happened after. "Tony, this is what I do. I've given up my life to make other people's lives better. I put all that aside so people like you and Jack and Michelle don't have to. If you get something out of life, I don't care what happens to mine. Too much has happened to me already. And it's in me to be the sacrifice for the rest of you, so if I can make that sacrifice…"
"You shouldn't have to," he cut her off sharply. "We're all able to have lives outside of this. Granted, maybe they're not the best of lives, but we have them, we live them through. What was it you used to say? 'Getting impersonal is what gets people killed. If you forget that there are people out there, you're not thinking correctly.' That's exactly what's happened to you and to Jack. You've both shut yourselves down. Except he's forgotten about anyone but himself and Kim, and you've forgotten about you. When was the last moment you just let go and let somebody else catch you?"
She
racked her memory, wanting desperately to prove him wrong. Her answer came out
of something beyond the shell she'd formed for herself. Her answer came out of
somewhere she didn't know she still had. "I don't know," she admitted, and in
that admission felt everything collapse. Being human meant letting things fall
apart. Building them over again meant being human. The contradiction … there
were no words for that. She just stared. He knew she wasn't staring at him but
inside of herself, trying to figure out the why after she'd been told the
truth. He did the one thing that someone needed to have done a long time ago: hold
her, and let her stop trying to hold herself together.
*I have dreamt of a place for you and I
No one knows who we are there
All I want is to give my life only to you
I've dreamt so long I cannot dream anymore
Let's run away, I'll take you there*
It was all becoming painfully clear for Tony now, his brain putting together facts and suspicions into an ever more painful puzzle. Since she had been a teenager, Liz had been the one upon whom the weight had rested. The death of her parents left her raising her brothers. And she had accepted that weight. She had come to work for CTU and become Jack's touchstone (and savior, more than once). She had accepted that weight. After Teri's death, she had stepped in to help pick up the pieces of the Bauer family. She'd accepted that weight. She had become Mason's defender, his counselor. She'd accepted that weight. She had lived her life between the gravity of Jack and Mason, what they stood for, what they were, trying to find a middle ground. She had accepted that weight on top of all those before. And that balance, that careful, protected existence she had made and known too long, had been ripped apart. It was an unimaginable weight, an unimaginably slow suffering to take. Yet the more painful it became, the more respect he had for Liz for surviving it. If anyone could rebound – no matter how difficult it would become – she could. She'd have to, or what did that say about him or the rest of them?
"What were you going to do?" he asked her after a moment.
"What?"
"When you got home." Here he managed a slight laugh. "You were going home, right?"
"Yeah, I was going at some point." She let out a long breath, trying to release all the emotion he'd brought up inside of her. "I was going to go see Jack and Kim."
"You should. If there's anybody that they'd want to see, it'd be you." Tony let her go, stepping back for a moment to take her in. His words had definitely hit her hard somewhere. The haze of sadness in her eyes seemed to have parted, or dimmed perhaps, and her tone of voice had gone quiet in that way it always did when she was pondering something. "This is going to seem like a stupid question, Liz, but maybe you should take a vacation?"
Now she turned and looked at him like he had just told her Alberta Green was his replacement. "What?"
"Do you know how many vacation days you have in the computer? A hundred and fifty-seven." He smirked slightly at the meteoric number. "I know you don't 'do' vacations, Liz. Make an exception. As a friend … you're out of touch. You live in the world."
This was it, then: their unofficial breakup. They had never officially been together, and now they were similarly separating. Just like that. In one particular word choice. She stood there, accepting that and moving on. If he was right in one thing, she didn't need something else to deal with. "What were you going to do?" she asked him. Point and counterpoint.
"Um, you know, I have some stuff I need to do. Being recently reinstated and everything." At her unconvinced glance, he exhaled knowingly. "And then after that, I was going to go home and sleep, and maybe call Michelle when I wake up from my catatonic nap."
"You should call Michelle."
"You should go see Jack."
Liz nodded. "Are we done, Tony?"
"Yeah, everything's just about wrapped up."
"No, Tony. Are we done?"
It was Tony's turn to nod, voice sober yet optimistic. "Yeah."
"Okay." And they left it at that, starting for the door.
Both of them had an implicit, silent agreement in those exchanged words, that
when they passed over the threshold of that claustrophobic space, they would
begin again. They would diverge from their common point and move down the roads
which fate had divined for them, and they would do so with a care and
commitment they had both let go eighteen months before. Yet, like all of
before, they would still be in the going together.
*We're leaving here tonight
There's no need to tell anyone
They'd only hold us down
So by the morning's light
We'll be halfway to anywhere
Where no one needs a reason*
Tony held the door open for Liz and the two of them walked back out onto the main floor. Many of the junior operatives had cleared out, leaving only a dozen or so senior staffers. A majority of the technology had been shut down. CTU, in its devastated glory, was once again a silent monolith of values greater than any one person who inhabited it. All the people who were inside of it, however, had helped make it what it was, a fact that both of them would have to try harder to remember.
Michelle approached them both. She had become a crucial linchpin in the day, risking her neck when it wasn't necessary. She'd filled Liz's role to an extent; Liz had been in a state almost like waking death since the explosion of the bomb, and Michelle had become the technician whom Jack had turned to. She had done an excellent job, and over the day Liz's opinion of her had gone from quiet dislike to an open respect. Anyone who knew Liz knew that shift was a particularly great change for someone of her intractable opinion. Especially given Michelle's relationship to Tony and Tony's relationship to Liz.
"Final damage reports on everything," Michelle said, showing Liz and Tony the clipboard with which she was working. "There's some things that are salvageable, but we're going to have to totally redo this place over the next couple months. It'll be a gradual thing, of course, but I hope you weren't partial to anything."
Tony and Liz looked over at each other. "No, not particularly," he said intentionally. The whole building in itself, the furniture even, represented so much that had happened to them. A new building would be inherent in a new start, as anal-retentive as that sounded; when trauma walks in the door, everything takes on a terrifying significance.
Liz spoke first. "I'm going to go," she said. Tony nodded. "Tell Jack and Kim we wish them the best, okay?" Liz smiled slightly. "I will," she promised, then looked at Michelle. "Take care of him, right?" she said. Michelle seemed amused. "Got it," she said, probably figuring it for a cute comment. The significance of it would hit her later, like everything else; she wasn't emotionally raw to these situations, not like Tony and Liz and Jack, all of whom felt pain instantaneously, no shield to protect them. Or, in Liz's case, perhaps the reverse was true and her shield had functioned too well.
She walked over to her desk and shouldered the duffel bag which held all of her personal effects, at least what was salvageable following the explosion. They were cleaning the place out for repairs, and that meant taking everything with her, even if she was coming back. The weight of it showed her just how much she'd accumulated in her years with CTU. She'd never thought about anything like it when she had been working simplistic tasks at the Electronic Crimes Bureau. But that was life: if you wanted more, you gave more. You took a risk, and you saw what happened. That was what life was for, finding out. Liz grabbed the globe paperweight off her desktop and walked through the double doors of CTU, knowing Tony was watching her every step of the way, until she was gone.
Liz had been able to get information on Jack right after he'd been sent to the hospital from Tony, and now she followed that information, making the drive. She expected that Jack would probably be in surgery; from what she had heard, his heart condition was deadly serious. It seemed amazing that a man who seemed immune to the laws of gravity and traffic would be finally felled, but Jack was, after all, only human. Human, like the rest of them … including Liz herself. Tony's words played in her mind on a tape loop as Liz imagined how terrified, how relieved Kim Bauer must be. Despite the enormity of her own feelings for Jack, Kim's concern would be multiplied a thousandfold, and with good reason. That was what people did. They felt for each other. Like she and Jack had both once done, and now did not do so much anymore.
She arrived at the hospital and was directed to Jack's room; as expected, he was undergoing surgery. It didn't matter. She would wait for him. She owed him that much, and more. Quietly she pushed open the door and walked in. Kim was waiting for her father, and she too seemed tired, beaten down, afraid. After all she had been through, she deserved such emotions. Yet, despite all that, she was still able to spare a slight smile for an old friend. "Liz," she said softly. "Dad's in surgery."
"Yeah, they told me." Liz sat down in the empty chair next to Kim and looked into her eyes. She was so young, only a teenager, and she'd seen things that would make her emotional age closer to that of her father. She had been forced to grow up in eighteen months, and she would never get her childhood back. That had been how it had all started for Liz, years ago. Looking forward, that was not a road she wanted Kim to have to walk down. "Are you all right?" she said, then realized how stupid that sounded. "I mean … are you holding out?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm dealing." Kim nodded, all of her
emotions and actions restrained, held back. "It's just been a really, really
long day, you know? Again." Liz nodded, taking the younger woman's hand in her
own. "Nothing I say is going to make any sense … make anything work … but it's
over. It's all over." Kim chuckled softly. "Yeah, I guess it is." Liz managed
part of a smile. "Nobody was ever going to let anything happen to you, Kim. You
can just … let us deal with it."
*Forget this life
Come with me
Don't look back you're safe now
Unlock your heart
Drop your guard
No one's left to stop you*
"It's just, it's just so much, you know?" Kim was suddenly telling her. "How all this could happen so fast … how we ended up in the middle of it …" Liz understood exactly where she was coming from, and said as much. "I lost somebody really important to me today," she said, softly, still disbelieving he was even gone. Kim's thoughts immediately turned over to sympathy. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. Liz nodded, thinking of W.H. Auden poems, that line about 'how nothing now will ever come to any good.' "Did your father tell you that George Mason took that plane down last night?" she elaborated. Now Kim's eyes widened, knowing Mason's significance in Liz's life through many a conversation, but almost having forgotten it. "You must be devastated," she said. "I am," Liz replied, "I just haven't felt it yet."
The two women sat there in silence for a moment, and then a moment more. Liz had been a part of Kim's life since before CTU had been a part of it. She'd helped Kim with her homework, come over for dinner, talked to Kim on the phone when Jack had been otherwise disposed for a few moments before he could take the call. Those were such simple, normal incidences, such undemanding fond moments that now seemed impossible to hold. In the face of the grand calling and higher sacrifice they had both brushed, one by fate and one by choice, to Kim and Liz such little things seemed insignificant, especially when they could slip away at any moment. They were just now learning to hold a moment as something other than a fragile thing to be doubted, to live a moment for what it was … to find the truth in the moment.
"How long's your father supposed to be in?" Liz asked. Kim glanced out the window. "I have no idea," she said. "I'm not even sure what they're doing in there, except it's something with his heart." Now she was worried again; Liz was worried too. The world needed more people like Jack Bauer; it couldn't afford to sideline the one it had. "He'll make it through all right," she promised Kim. "Knowing your father, nothing short of the end of the world would keep him away from you." This made the young woman smile. "Yeah, you've got that right," she said. "I guess I forgot how great of a father I had." The auburn-haired CTU agent understood this sentiment perfectly. "We all forget things, sometimes, when other things we can't help but remember."
*Forget this life
Come with me
Don't look back you're safe now
Unlock your heart
Drop your guard
No one's left to stop you now*
The two of them waited there, speaking to each other for the longest time in a long while, coming back into each other's lives again. When Jack had shut everyone out, he'd forgotten how much he'd hurt Kim. When Liz had refused to shut anyone out, she had forgotten how much she'd hurt herself. Both of them walked the same line, shared some of the same wounded emotions. Liz supposed they always would; they were two of maybe a half-dozen people who had been painfully close to two terrible days in the history of the nation, and therein was created a bastion of experience and emotion that could never be felt or matched by anyone who hadn't been right there, watching everything fall apart, like CTU itself was now a disaster area.
For everything falling apart, though, there were still certainties left in their lives. They were both still alive, now armed with an even greater understanding than they had been possessed of eighteen months before. Jack Bauer would live. The city of Los Angeles would continue to go on in its almost misguided state. Days would continue to unfold and present happiness, sorrow, lessons, memories. There would be choices. There were always choices. People became the sum total of their choices. A great many more choices lay ahead of all of them than behind them, and they could not change the ones they had made or that had been made for them, only reconcile them with what they had left to do.
A nurse came and told them that Jack was out of surgery, escorting them to the post-op recovery room where he was. As itinerant as Jack was, he had completely ignored the doctor's recommendation that he rest. He insisted on being awake. He'd been awake for more than twenty-four hours, and he insisted on staying that way to be with his daughter, to look forward at what would be, rather than at what had been. Kim rushed to her father, almost crying with relief, and Liz simply watched in the quiet, her gratefulness something she would never say.
"Liz, what the hell are you doing here?" Jack asked, and Liz's head turned.
"I came to see you, Jack, obviously," she retorted.
He smiled slightly, though he was still in some pain. "You didn't have anything better to do?"
Once again, Liz thought of Tony. "No, not at all," she told Jack. "How are you?"
"I'll be
all right," he said, content with that fact, and the fact that he was content
about that made her willing to accept that she could be. She walked over to the
other side of the bed, opposite from Kim, and took Jack's other hand, giving it
a gentle, reassuring squeeze. A feeling she hadn't felt in a long while coursed
through her veins when he squeezed back. For both of them, this was how it
would end, how it would work today.
*We're leaving here tonight
There's no need to tell anyone
They'd only hold us down
So by the morning light
We'll be halfway to anywhere
Where love is more than just your name*
They say that there comes one moment in your life that determines the course of it. One moment in time where you must decide who you are and what you stand for. You wonder, if that moment had been different, how your life might have gone. Except Liz and Jack and Kim and Tony knew the truth for what it was: it wasn't just one moment that made those decisions, but moments that could happen on any given day.
Suddenly, there was noise in the hallway, and Kim caught the sound of the word "President." Acting on instinct, she let go of her father's hand and raced over to the television, fearing the worst as she switched it over to the news channel and turned up the volume. Reporters were saying that the President had collapsed following his speech to the public about the crisis that had just happened, and that it appeared to be a suspicious circumstance.
"What's happening?" Kim said, but neither adult answered her for the moment, watching with her the next crisis which life had matriculated when they had simply had enough. When you live from one moment to the next, one crisis to the next, you wonder when the last moment will be, or if there will ever be such a thing. It had been not so long ago that there had been a vacant silence, and now once again there was just the unpredictable assault of noise and consequences.
Liz grasped Jack's hand ever tighter, standing by his side, the way she'd come into his life and Kim's life and the rest of everyone else's lives. Tony had awakened in her an understanding of something she had left long ago. With it came a rush of feelings: shock, anger, fear, concern, compassion. She had thought she'd known who she was, but she was wrong. In that moment, she stood with the only people that she had left to cling to, and feeling human once again, she had another realization: It wasn't over. It hadn't even begun.
It was ten-forty a.m., eighteen months after the California Presidential primary.