Hi! This is the first fanfiction I have ever written. I'm definitely a math/science-minded kind of person and normally would never write something unless forced to for school, so I'm a total beginner at this. But after watching the show recently, I had a lot of thoughts on Jack's return to China in season 6 episode 1, which I eventually ended up writing down in the form of this fic. I hope you like it!
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"We're asking you to sacrifice yourself so we can eliminate Assad."
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Jack's first thought was Audrey, his second Kim. Once he was assured that they didn't know he was back and never would, his thoughts began to meander.
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As an agent, it had been vital for him to think in a straight line: cause and effect, action and reaction, problem and solution. In China, he had learned to let his thoughts wander. It was a defense mechanism. He had plenty of time to think during those long, hellish nights in his cell, when every time he began to drift off to sleep, the guards came in to wake him with kicks or ice water or worse. The longer he could maintain a stream of consciousness, the less time he had to think about his sorry state and his bleak future, or to question if it would really be so bad to tell them something small so he could have some time to gather his strength.
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Certain parts of his mind he kept walled off, mainly anything to do with Audrey, Teri, or Kim; it was too painful to bring them to such a dark place only to lose them all over again when the guards' footsteps echoed down the hallway. But it was impossible to survive without daydreaming about something nice, so he focused on little luxuries, pleasant things that he nonetheless could have lived without even before his life had gone to hell. Things like the Pacific Ocean lapping gently around him, wind ruffling his hair as he caught a perfectly sized wave on his surfboard. Or those jars of jellybeans he would win at fairs as a kid, when he was so good at guessing how many were in the jar. He spent hours trying to remember all the different flavors and ranking them against each other.
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One day, he fantasized about a puppy snuggling up to him as he lay injured and alone in his cell. A chocolate lab, like the one he had always begged his mom for when he was growing up. Then an image came to his mind of Cheng hurting the dog to get Jack to talk. That hit too close to home. After that, he restricted himself to simpler fantasies, things he probably could have expected at most prisons: shoes, a blanket, a shower, another portion of rice. Having his fingernails back.
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Before long, he began to catch himself dreaming of death.
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He stopped himself every time. The desire to die, he told himself, was born out of pure selfishness, out of a longing to end the pain that he was starting to believe he deserved. He had known the consequences when he made the decision to raid the Chinese consulate, and now he was paying them. He had no right to take the easy way out. He wanted his death to mean something, wanted someone else to benefit from it. It was the least he could do after so many people had given their lives to protect him.
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So he fought on. He never let himself think about how exactly the opportunity for a worthy death would present itself, because then he would realize how unlikely it was. His hopes of escape had died the night they had thrown him naked in the snow and left him there, uncuffed, with only a single guard watching him. It was the perfect opportunity, yet prior abuse had left him so weak that all he could do was curl up into a miserable little ball, trying to enjoy the first few seconds of numbness before bone-deep agony set in. His hopes of rescue had died soon after that, leaving him with nothing but blind hope that maybe, if he held on long enough, some unforeseen opening would present itself. Anyway, the chances would never become zero unless he himself made them so. He liked the power that gave him.
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Now here it was, that light at the end of the tunnel, which had been his only reason to keep fighting as he languished and suffered and bled, even as he had hardly dared to hope for it. Yet he didn't jubilate as he had expected to, didn't feel any relief, any weight coming off his chest. If anything, he felt… indifferent.
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Maybe it was because, after month after month of enduring nothing but pain and humiliation, he had forgotten how to feel any kind of positive emotion. Maybe it was because a rather vocal part of him was concerned by how perfectly this fit into what he had wanted. That same part was telling him that this was all a hallucination, that any minute now he would wake up lying on his back on a metal table, an IV in his arm, his limbs immobilized with barbed wire that bit deeper into his skin every time the hallucinogen sent a spasm through his muscles.
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Or maybe it was because he no longer considered himself human. Why should he? For twenty months he had been treated worse than an object. Objects didn't have emotions. They had no reason to. They couldn't control what happened to them. They did as they were told and accepted the consequences as they came. Jack was the same way. It didn't matter what he wanted. His instructions were to sacrifice himself, so that was what he would do.
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He snapped out of his thoughts as he saw movement in the corner of his eye. He may have lost a lot of himself in China, but his reflexes were still more than intact. They were another defense mechanism; the faster he could see an attack coming, the more time he had to protect his head and his perpetually injured ribcage. Assuming he wasn't in restraints, of course, which he had been much of the time. But even then, abuse was easier to take when you could brace yourself for it. The few times they had blindfolded him had been hell.
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The movement he spotted this time was Curtis reaching for his gun. Jack was more than a little surprised as he heard his own voice weakly saying, "I know what's being asked of me, Curtis. You don't need your firearm." It felt odd, almost uncanny, to be saying so many words at once. It was as though seeing Bill and Curtis had activated some remote, cobwebbed corner of his brain that he could control only unconsciously, through muscle memory.
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Jack's eye for detail had also been untarnished by his experiences in China, and in the brief glimpse he caught of Curtis before he returned his eyes to the ground, he noticed his former coworker's clothes, clean and neatly pressed. His mind returned to the oh-so-familiar daydreams that had occupied it for so long. A shower, a shave, a haircut, clean clothes, clean skin, clean hair…
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It hit him so suddenly that he almost flinched. He wasn't in China anymore, under the thumb of the merciless Cheng, whose sole goal in life seemed to be to make Jack miserable. Now his masters were Bill and Curtis, who would give him anything he asked for so long as it didn't interfere with the mission.
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He knew this consciously, but he still had to screw up all his courage and tense up in anticipation of punishment as he croaked, "before we do this, I would like to clean up."
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No one snapped back at him. No one hurt him. Curtis pointed Jack to an area with a mirror in which he hardly recognized his own reflection. He picked up a pair of scissors, reluctantly at first as he remembered all the sharp objects in China, none of them used for innocuous purposes. Quickly, he grew bolder, and before long his hair was neatly trimmed and his grimy beard was on the ground. The shower was more of a rinse, as he didn't have time to do any more than step under the stream and shampoo his hair, but it felt so good he wanted to cry. He changed into the clean clothes; the shirt was whiter than anything he had seen since last winter's snow, and there were buttons and a belt and socks and shoes!
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Before he left, Jack caught a last glimpse of himself in the mirror. Now he looked like federal agent Jack Bauer, and not whatever wretch had occupied that nasty, dirty cell for the last twenty months. Finally he had some dignity, finally he looked – dare he say it? – human.
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He sure hoped this wasn't a hallucination, because he was suddenly lighter than a feather with relief, so light that the wind could carry him away from this cruel, heartless world.
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And he could let it, because it would be for something.