Summary: I will let you down; I will make you hurt. Jack knows what he is.
Spoilers: Through the third-season finale, "Day 3: 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m."
Rating: R for language and sexual references
Disclaimer: Jack Bauer and all related characters are the property of Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow, Imagine Television, and Twentieth Century Fox.
You have your shit together by the time you pull into the CTU parking garage. There's a small residual ache in the center of your chest, but you're not noticing it anymore as you fix your I.D. card to your shirt and walk through the security checkpoint.
The courier who's waiting for you in the interrogation room is small and scared-looking when you first see him on the cameras and he's not aware he's being watched. When you slam into the room, scared is replaced by cocky, a beat too late for it to be at all genuine. You know before either of you has said a word that this sorry motherfucker is a nothing, not even important enough to be a minor player. It's cliche to say that he's a pawn, but that's what he is. He's barely worth bothering with.
But even a blind pig can turn up a truffle every now and again, and who knows what he may reveal without realizing what he's just given away? So you question him, and when he stonewalls, you grab him by the shirt and throw him up against a wall and plant your knee in his diaphragm, and talk to him in a soft voice about all the things you could do to him. How much they would hurt. How he would end up begging you to let him die, and how he could be kept alive long after he ceases to resemble anything that was ever human.
He breaks in less than an hour.
You leave him hunched on the floor, clutching his abdomen as he vomits up his last meal, and let others take over. During a quick trip to the men's room, you splash some water on your face and rinse out your mouth a few times. You've been awake for more than 33 hours now, and bed is beginning to seem like an opium dream, like nothing you'll ever see again. It's all right; you're in the zone now. You call Kim, and she tells you that Chase is still in surgery. It's going all right. No, they still don't know if the reattachment is going to be successful. You thank her and allow yourself one brief moment of empathy before getting back to work.
You're at hour 38 when you're finally sent home, forced home over your protests. Kim has called back to report that Chase is out of surgery. He has two hands again, but they don't know how much use he's going to regain; there's also the possibility that his body may reject the limb, and it'll need to be re-amputated. You thank her, again, and promise that you'll come for a visit tomorrow. Your daughter's voice is distant when she says goodbye, and you can sense that, in the long run, your visit will make very little difference one way or the other.
Your anonymous apartment in the Miracle Mile is cool and dark. When you let yourself in, there's a musty smell in the air, as if you've been away for a year, instead of less than two days. You crack a window and then head for the shower without looking at the answering machine.
The spray of the water against your head is soothing, and you lean into it without bothering to scrub. Your entire body aches, and you don't care so much about getting clean as you do about easing some of the knotted muscles.
Getting clean.
That's something else you have forced yourself not to think about over the last few hours. It's something you're going to deal with eventually, soon, now. You haven't been jonesing for a fix for a while, but that doesn't mean that sooner or later you're not going to start thinking about the needle again. You know that if you opened your eyes, you would see the track marks on the insides of your elbows. What you remember even more sharply than the rush of the heroin itself is the feel of the needle sliding home. When you were a kid, you hated needles, would scream every time you went to the doctor. How things change. A sharp sting of pain, a new hole ripped in the tender flesh of your arm, and for one second you'd feel alive and the world would spin with color. You came to crave this as much as, more than, the drug itself.
Shutting off the water, you step dripping onto the bathmat and go into the bedroom without bothering to towel off. You drop onto the bed, arms spread-eagled, and stare at the ceiling. There's a sinking feeling in your gut that sleep is far off; you're exhausted but not sleepy, a shitty state to be in. If you could switch off your brain, you could sleep. You know this is going to be impossible, so instead you try to take stock of the day, without any of the emotional bullshit.
You stopped the virus from getting out. That's the bottom line. Saunders is dead, taking with him any knowledge he could have provided you with, but maybe that's not so bad. You don't know what happened to him to turn him into what he was, in Kosovo or after it, but there's no point in speculation. The man you confronted today isn't the man you knew. That man died years ago, and mourning him will profit you nothing.
Everything else is collateral damage. That's the by-the-book answer by which you could justify and be absolved of this entire hellish day. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. By that reckoning, everything from the loss of Chase's hand and the forced execution of Ryan Chappelle, to the end of Tony Almeida's career and your own heroin addiction, is an acceptable loss. There's nothing, now, that you could do to change any of it anyway.
One thing, you correct yourself: you will talk to David Palmer again soon, and you'll do your best to convince him that his exit from office should be accompanied by a presidential pardon or two, where appropriate. He owes you; he owes all of you.
There are things about the past day that you don't regret: the Salazars, and Nina Myers. You're sorry that Ramon Salazar put his foolish trust in you, but he got nothing that he didn't deserve. As for Nina, she signed her own death warrant a long time ago, and your only regret is that her end was so nearly incidental.
You've fantasized for almost five years about all the things you could have done to her, all the ways you could have gotten her in your clutches and made her die by inches. These visions were even more exciting than your old visions, back in the days before you learned what she really was, of fucking her. More than once, you woke from a dream with the phantom copper taste of her blood on your tongue, hard as a rock and already jerking off.
So much for that, you think now, and maybe those fantasies will keep you going for a while yet, even as her corpse cools in the morgue.
You do regret Claudia, and are sorry for the child. You didn't want that to happen, but you shouldn't have gotten involved with her in the first place. Not because she was Hector's woman -- you didn't give a damn about the sanctity of that relationship -- but because you know what happens to everyone who swings too close to your orbit.
Everyone you know always goes away, and you know in your heart that this is for the best. Better to let them down, to let them see you for what you are, than to allow fate to take its course. The ones who don't leave, who stay too long instead of getting out while the getting is good, end up dead or wishing they were. Or wishing you were dead.
You made a mistake with Kim, thinking in a moment of misguided arrogance that the only way to keep her safe was to keep her in your line of sight. Now you've been reminded why this is a foolish choice, and you know that you'll have to send her away soon. Her mother's blood is on your hands; hers can't join it. If you do nothing else right in what passes for your personal life, you'll do this. One good deed can't make up for anything else, but you never expected to go to heaven anyway.
Lying here on your bed, miles beyond tired and unable to sleep, you know that all you're doing now is waiting, for the inevitable phone call from CTU and whatever new crisis it will bring with it. They'll call and you'll get up and get dressed and go to your car, and begin another day. For now, you try to just be, to exist without ripping open any old scars. You stare up at the ceiling fan and count your breaths, and listen to traffic going past up on Fairfax.
In the hour before dawn, as the dark begins to creep back toward light, you think about entropy. You broke something inside yourself a long time ago, smashed it deliberately because you knew it was the only way you could do your job with any degree of effectiveness. The only way you could go on day after day without throwing yourself off the Fourth Street Bridge, or fellating your SIG-Sauer. You don't regret this. You're a survivor; it's what you do.
The phone rings. You answer it.