Chapter 3: The Report

Erin Driscoll washed her hands. She had spent the day gardening, cleaning, and generally avoiding the envelopes sitting on her kitchen counter. There was nothing left to do except open them. She cursed herself for being so pathetic. It wasn't long ago that she wouldn't have hesitated to open them and read them, even if she knew what they said. It wasn't so long ago she would've known, either.

She decided to look at McGill's report first. If nothing else, she wanted to know how she had come off in the interview. Besides, Joanne had taken a risk leaking the supposedly classified document to her.

McGill had been impressed by her "stoicism" and thought she would "make a formidable witness" with the House subcommittee. While he felt that allowing Jack Bauer to return to the field was a "serious error," he nevertheless thought Erin had done a better job controlling Bauer than Bill Buchanan had. Ha. So she wasn't the only one.

His major complaint about her performance was that she seemed to have a hard time getting her staff to follow her, but he blamed most of that on Bauer, too. Surprisingly, he had completely omitted her calling back of the LAPD car. Erin wondered if that was because he was building a case for his recommendation or because he sympathized with her. The old Erin would have preferred the former.

Opening the second envelope, she expected to see a confirmation from District of McGill's recommendation. Instead, she got a pink slip on the official CTU letterhead. She'd been fired. She'd been fired through the fucking mail.

Numbly, Erin clutched at the kitchen table. All she could do was wonder what was left for someone who had sacrificed everything for her career and then lost that, too.

---

Bill Buchanan sat in his living room, shirt unbuttoned and stocking feet resting on an ottoman. A cup of hot Earl Grey tea sat at his right hand, while his left held a copy of McGill's report. He'd spent a couple of Lakers box seats to get it, but it was pretty good reading. He'd read the letter from District first and already knew they wanted him for Special Agent in Charge of CTU Los Angeles. That wasn't exactly a demotion, although it wasn't an attaboy, either. It meant that District had confidence in his abilities, but it also meant his former employees at Division were now technically higher-ranking than him.

Bill thought that would please McGill, who put far too much stock in the bureaucracy. However, McGill apparently wanted Bill fired, citing "multiple illegal actions" requiring "increasingly complex whitewashing."

On a final skimming, Bill felt the words more than analyzing them. There was a palpable dislike for both Bill and Jack oozing through McGill's writing. The Boy Wonder had a decent poker face and his diction was respectably flat, but his arrangement of the facts and the details he selected revealed a lot more than he probably realized. Bill filed this information away for future reference, as he filed the report away in his wall safe. He had never regretted majoring in English.

---

"Thanks for bailing me out," Jenny McGill told her brother, hopping into the passenger seat of his car. "This is nice. How much'd it cost?"

"It's leased. Look, just shut up, will you? I've had a bad enough day already."

"Aww. You gonna tell me about it, or is national security at stake?" she teased.

Lynn hesitated, petulantly, just to make her wait. "A guy I recommended for the shitcan was just put in charge of the Los Angeles domestic unit, and the poor woman whose daughter killed herself got said shitcan instead."

"So? If you weren't the guy doing the shitcanning, how do they know what you said?"

"They're intelligence agents, Jenny. Their job is to find things out." Lynn rolled his eyes skyward. "I get called on the carpet and my boss is all, Big picture, McGill! Buchanan gets results! Torture's okay if it's mostly guilty people! Who cares if he almost started a war with China! Why are you laughing?"

"I can't believe there's a bunch of pencilnecks in an office somewhere that get to decide who tortures who. Especially if one of them is you."

"That's the point. I don't decide anything, but I'm on record as thinking the new Special Agent in Charge of CTU Los Angeles should be fired."

Jenny shrugged. "When have you ever had to go to CTU LA? Never. Not even when you had to write your book report on it."

"I guess," Lynn sighed. "You know, I read about all the Special Agents in Charge back to Jack Bauer. The number of people who've had that job...probably a meteor will fall on Buchanan before we ever have to work together..."

Author's Notes: This is a response to a challenge (see my user page for more info). I picked Erin Driscoll and Bill Buchanan out of a hat and had to write a story about them. It's not the worst combo ever, but they're both very starchy. I wouldn't say they're wooden, but we could build a boat. So the "challenge" was not so much to come up with a realistic situation, but rather, to come up with an interesting situation.

My wonderful husband came up with the idea to use our favorite character, Lynn McGill, as a sounding board for Erin and Bill. An internal investigation was a terrific setup to allow the characters to reveal themselves without needing an action plot, flashbacks, or other contrivance. It's all about two people handling the same situation differently.

In case anyone was wondering, I do have a source for Bill's English major. It's in his character profile on the official Fox website.

Thanks for reading!