Monday
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The house was dark, silent. Everyone was asleep, but Jack. He had woken up after midnight, unable to pinpoint why. For a while, he lay there on the couch, staring at the ceiling,
thoughts swirling in his head. Audrey. The things he had told her—and the things he hadn't.
His mind drifted back to Teri and the good times they'd shared. Seeing Kim and Chase tonight had stirred something deep within him, something bittersweet. It reminded him of the better days of his marriage, before everything started to fall apart.
His thoughts circled back to Chase. He had urged him to quit CTU, to get out while he still could, while there was time to save his family. Jack wished someone had told him that when he was younger. But at 18, he had been too naïve to see where his path would lead. Signing up for ROTC had felt like the right choice back then, a way to escape his father's shadow.
Maybe he shouldn't have walked away from the company. He pushed the thought away—how could he regret it? Without those decisions, Kim wouldn't even exist. And Teri... she had been the best thing in his life.
Unable to shake the weight of his memories, Jack reached for the small lamp by the couch, switching it on. He pulled the old photo album toward him, the one he had brought from storage. He opened it, leafing through the early pages. 1985. The beginning. The time before Kim was born. There were pictures of his red and white Yamaha, his motorcycle from back then. Easier times. He hadn't ridden a bike in years, he realized. Longer ago than he had last flown a helicopter or an airplane.
He smiled at the sight of the photos of his wedding to Teri. A small ceremony in Vegas, her belly barely visible beneath the simple dress she wore. He remembered the rented tuxedo. Teri hadn't wanted him to wear his military uniform; it was the only formal outfit he had, but she wanted something different for their day.
The photos from Christmas 1986 made him pause. The dorm at UCLA, the big Christmas tree everyone had decorated. Jack ran his hand over the image of Teri, pregnant with Kim. Six months along. He remembered falling asleep beside her, his hand resting on her belly, waiting for the baby to move. The memory tugged at his heart.
He turned the pages, watching Kim grow in the photos. There were pictures from his graduation—Teri holding Kim in her arms, his military uniform on full display. He remembered how much Teri disliked that uniform, how she had never wanted a family photo with him wearing it.
Then came the photos of 1988, when things had begun to change. He spotted a picture of himself and Kim, sitting on the floor while she played. He had been on sick leave for months at that point. He saw the crutches in the background and grimaced. That time had been a blur of arguments with Teri and long, silent stretches where they avoided each other. He would have preferred to skip past these pages, but he couldn't. This was where things had started to go wrong.
Kim had skipped these pages yesterday when she had gone through the album. She knew everything. She had been there. Even though she had been so little, she had always sensed the tension between him and Teri. And now, she even covered for him, by not bringing it up, by not forcing him to remember, by even hiding these times from Chase. Why was she doing this?
He went on.
The photos from later years showed a family holding itself together by habit, not love. Birthdays, Christmases, holidays—moments when you had to gather, even if the warmth was gone. He could see it in Teri's smile, how forced it had become. And in his own. The guilt welled up inside him as he stared at a photo of Teri, her smile thin and distant. He couldn't deny it anymore. It had been his fault. He hadn't been there for her, for them. He had followed a path he had thought would be the right one.
Jack closed the album and leaned back on the couch, staring up at the ceiling. His conversations with Audrey flooded his mind. He had told her about the good times—only the good times. He hadn't spoken about these years, the ones where his marriage had slowly unraveled. He had painted a version of himself that was only half true, leaving out the darker parts, the mistakes that haunted him.
He picked up the phone, staring at it for a moment before typing a message. Something simple, just because he couldn't hold back. To calm the storm of thoughts in his head. He wrote something innocuous, something that wouldn't hint at the turmoil inside him. Jack couldn't deny it anymore—he felt something for Audrey. Something deeper than he had admitted to himself before. But it wasn't fair to her. She had gotten attached to the version of him he had shown her, not the man he truly was. She deserved to know everything, not just the good parts.
And now, he felt the pull to tell her the truth. The whole truth. Even though it hurt. Even if it meant pushing her away, telling her implicitly to get away from him, even if it meant losing her.
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Five hours later, Audrey did something that had become almost automatic: waking up, switching off the alarm clock, and reaching for her phone on the nightstand. She rubbed her eyes, already expecting the usual—the empty inbox, no new messages. But as her fingers grasped the phone, she saw something unexpected.
6 unread messages.
She blinked, staring at the screen in disbelief. Her heart quickened as she sat up in bed, quickly reading the first one. They were all from the past night.
10:30 "Hey"
10:37 "Guess you're already asleep. I'm staying at Kim's house. Can't stay up much longer or I'll fall asleep with the phone in my hands. Wouldn't want that."
Audrey smiled, imagining Jack sneaking the phone out just to send her a message, waiting for her reply that had never come.
02:32 "Sorry that we couldn't speak."
02:32 "Hope you still have some China left."
Audrey chuckled softly. The small joke, a reminder of their late-night conversations, made her feel lighter, even if just for a moment.
The next message caught her attention.
02:35 "I'll be staying with Kim for a few days, need to find a way to charge the phone without being seen."
A pang of guilt flickered through her. He was juggling so much—being with his family, keeping secrets, trying to manage this fragile connection between them. She should have known he wouldn't be able to call. Yet, she had been disappointed, almost bitter, waiting for something she knew deep down was impossible.
Then, the last message:
02:40 "Hope to hear from you soon."
Audrey felt a strange mixture of joy and guilt as she read it. She should have left her DoD phone on last night. Instead, she had switched it to silent at some point in the evening, when sinking into a back-and-forth conversation with Paul that had ultimately led nowhere.
She sighed, feeling like she had made a mistake. Why had she texted Paul back? His long, apologetic messages from the night before had tugged at something—maybe a memory of what they used to have, maybe just the need to fill the void with something, anything. But it wasn't real, not anymore. And she knew that. She had been using Paul to fill the silence, to fill the space Jack's absence had left, even though she knew she didn't want him back. But unlike Jack, he had felt reachable.
Audrey stared at Jack's last message, biting her lip. She shouldn't have indulged Paul's apology. She had been waiting for Jack and letting herself get pulled into something meaningless, something safe, with Paul.
With a heavy sigh, she set the phone down, the guilt gnawing at her. Jack had thought about her, sent her messages, while she had let herself drift into something she didn't even want. She rubbed her eyes, trying to shake the feeling of guilt and isolation. She wasn't even sure if Jack could reach out again today. He was with his family.
Nevertheless, she wrote back a simple "Good morning."
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Later, she sat in her office, staring blankly at the computer screen, her fingers hovering over the keys, trying and failing to focus on the work in front of her. Her thoughts kept drifting back to Jack. She had tried to push them aside, to get lost in her responsibilities, but the pull was too strong. Her colleagues were all around her, but none of them noticed her distraction. No one noticed the extra phone she carried either; in this world, secure phones weren't anything out of the ordinary.
By 11 a.m., she still hadn't heard anything from Jack. She glanced at the phone, half hoping for a message that wasn't there. Her fingers itched with the need to reach out, to know what was happening with him. But instead of texting him, she found herself opening a socket to the DoD server. She hesitated for a second before typing his name into the search bar.
Jack Bauer.
His file came up immediately, cold, factual, and clinical. A picture of him with not a faint of a smile. That picture looked different from the man she had imagined while talking to him for so many hours. Audrey stared at it for a moment. Born February 18, 1966, she read. She made a mental note to herself. His birthday was coming up next week.
But that wasn't what she was really searching for. Audrey's mind kept circling back to the stories Jack had told her. He had opened up about the early days with Teri, about Kim, about how much he had loved being a father. He had painted a picture of a man who had cherished his family. But somewhere along the line, something must have shifted.
She couldn't reconcile the man who had adored his wife and daughter with the ruthless figure he had become in the military, the number of kills his file (almost proudly) said. He had never said it outright, but Audrey knew that Jack had been used for operations most people would never hear about—dangerous missions, hits that left no trace. What had happened to him during those years? What had made him turn into someone who could do those things, and then come home like nothing had changed?
She scrolled through his file, her eyes scanning the entries. There were gaps—classified operations, missions labeled under code names she didn't recognize. The thought of Jack, out there in the world, disappearing for weeks or months, carrying out assignments that would break most people. Audrey couldn't shake the image of him, coming back to his family after a mission, trying to slip back into the role of a father and husband while carrying the memories of what he had done.
She stared at the screen, the clinical details of Jack's life staring back at her. Somewhere along the way, the loving father he had once been had been overshadowed by the soldier, the operative, the man who was sent to do the impossible.
Audrey scrolled further down, her eyes locking onto the classified section of Jack's file. She was looking for the start of it all, the first mission that had set him on this path. Her finger hovered over the line marked "September 1988 (Level 8 required)"—the first classified entry. Kim would have been 18 months old then. Jack had been stationed at Fort Devens, just another young lieutenant with garrison duty, but something had happened in September 1988. Two months later, he was promoted to First Lieutenant, and not long after that, he began training for Special Ops. She wondered about his early promotion. Usually, the promotion from second to first lieutenant happened after 18 months, not after eight.
Audrey's fingers lingered over the button. Level 8 clearance, she could open it. Most of Jack's missions, even those from the Cordilla Virus crisis, were classified at Level 6 or 7, but this… this must have been something big.
She hesitated. Should she? It would be logged that she had opened it. Would anyone even care? She opened so many classified files each day, one more wouldn't make a difference. If Jack wanted her to know, he would tell her, wouldn't he? She felt guilty for prying, for wanting to understand the parts of his life he kept hidden. Her thoughts spiraled, torn between curiosity and loyalty, the need to know versus the decency to respect his privacy.
Suddenly, her phone vibrated, pulling her out of the moment. A message from Jack lit up her screen: 11:17 "I've got 30 minutes."
Her heart leaped. She quickly closed his file and the server socket, her mind dissolving in the face of his message. She grabbed her phone and left her desk, searching for a quiet meeting room to take the call, when her colleagues came back in, reminding her of the meeting that she was already late for. She had totally forgotten it.
She hurriedly wrote back: "Can't. Meetings."
Jack looked at her message, a little disappointed. The offer to drive Chase to his therapy session, to get out of the house, had been for nothing. He wrote back a promise to try to call later that night. He sat in the car, waiting, thinking. He'd need to find another reason to sneak away from the house, even if it meant raising Kim's suspicions that he was using drugs again. But he needed this—he needed to talk to Audrey, to set a few things straight that had been bothering him throughout the whole day and the night before, especially when he had looked through the photo album again, at the later years: 1988 to 1991. He couldn't talk to Kim about this. It would trigger things that could only lead to a fight. A severe one.
When the evening arrived, Jack didn't find the time to leave the house. Not without Kim noticing. She kept a close eye on him, probably without realizing it herself, but Jack could feel it—her silent concern, her unspoken worry. If he left now, without any real reason, she'd think he was slipping, that he was heading off to meet a dealer. And the truth was, he couldn't even blame her for thinking that.
So, he stayed. The house bustled with the usual evening routines—dinner, putting Angela to bed, sitting together, avoiding talking about the severe topics. Jack moved through it all, feeling a growing sense of guilt. Guilt for keeping Audrey in the dark, for not telling her the whole truth about his past, about the moments when everything fell apart. And guilt for not calling her at all tonight, even though he had promised he would. He hoped she'd understand, but that didn't make it any easier. Even though life would have seemed perfect, he was missing something.
A person who he could honestly talk to. About anything. Everything. Especially about the classified stuff that Kim wouldn't even ask him about, because she'd already know she'd just force him to lie.
Eventually, when the house had quieted down, Jack managed to slip into the bathroom. It had become his refuge lately, the one place where he could plug in his phone and send Audrey a message without drawing suspicion. The battery had died earlier, and he quickly plugged it in, letting it charge just enough to send her a short apology.
He hit send, staring at the phone for a moment before turning it off and tucking it back into his bag. It wasn't much, but it was all he could do for now. He took a deep breath, getting himself ready to smile again, to forget about all the worries and the classified stuff.
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Later that night, when the house was silent and dark again, Jack found himself lying on the couch, unable to sleep. His mind was restless, circling back to 1988, like it had the night before. He knew what was haunting him—the unfinished business of his past, remembering something and being unable to talk about it, because everything was classified. It gnawed at him, pulling him deeper into his memories.
He switched on the small lamp beside the couch, casting a dim glow over the room. The house felt like a haven, a place of warmth and safety, but for Jack, it was filled with ghosts, too—reminders of the life he had spent detached from his loved ones, because he hadn't ever told them the truth. He glanced at the photo album Kim had put back on the shelf, the same one he had gone through last night.
Jack got up, reaching for it again. He opened the later pages again, the ones Kim had obviously avoided yesterday. He turned to the last photo before the streak of pictures that only showed him and Kim. There it was—Teri, smiling, her arms around her eighteen month old daughter. She looked happy, unaware of what the next few days would bring, unaware of how quickly things would unravel.
He stared at the photo, feeling a familiar tightness in his chest. That had been one of the last good days before everything changed. Jack gently pulled the photo out of the album and placed the rest of it back on the shelf. He lay back down on the couch, the photo resting in his hand, his eyes tracing the lines of Teri's smile, Kim's tiny face.
In the dim light, Jack lay there, the weight of the past pressing down on him. His thoughts drifted back to 1988, to the mission that had set everything in motion. Kim didn't know. Teri hadn't known about it. He – and everyone else at Fort Devens – had told her that it was a training mission that had gone horribly wrong.
She had fallen for the excuse.
Even now, he wondered how easily she had fallen for the lie.
And he wondered how he'd been able to look into her eyes, knowing the truth, unable to say it aloud.
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