Post-S3: Rehab, Day 13

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The hours passed, but only slowly. Endless meetings, a tight schedule, lunch break which didn't even deserve its name because it was just another bunch of meetings, paired with food.

Audrey had barely slept that night. She hadn't managed to get home before midnight, unable to really enjoy the evening with her friends. No, she couldn't call him at such a time. Should she? No. But she still felt the urge to go to his number and hit the call button, to apologize for ending the call so abruptly.
After thinking forth an back for half an hour, it was even later than before. No, now she'd definitely not call.

She went to bed and thought about what he had said to her, about not having left the army after these four years.
He had sounded like he was still heavily regretting it.
He had no reason to regret it. She had read his file. The things that he had managed to do throughout the past fifteen years were remarkable.

Eight months ago, she had read his file through the eyes of a DoD officer: focused on the mission, on previous experience, injuries, capabilities. Those were the items she remembered. It was a stone-cold assessment, which they did every day.

Lists of injuries. Mentions of comrades, colleagues and other relevant persons who died in the course of past missions.
The pain and the deaths got lost in between the bureaucratism.

She guessed that she only knew some of the losses that he had had to endure in these past fifteen years. Even if they didn't take a lot of space in his file, they seemed to occupy his thoughts and memories. It weren't the wins which stayed in his mind to tell him that his life had been alright, it had to be the losses that were tormenting his brain.

She had lain in bed, trying to put herself in his position. It sent shivers down her spine to think of being on the other side of her desk: facing all the dangers that he'd somehow managed to survive, like all those guys whose lives she had decided on.

Lying in the dark, she thought again about calling him in the middle of the night, just to tell him that his decision not to leave the guns behind had been a good one. Who knew how the world would have turned out to be, if he hadn't been around to stop all these attacks from happening?

Damn it, she realized, you insensitive egoist. You'd be telling him that it was good to trade his family, his friends and his happiness for the mission. Nothing else. He's a wreck because of all this.

Restlessly she lay in bed, the rest of the night, unable to sleep.

She was tired now, having somehow dragged herself through the meetings until six thirty in the evening, when she hurriedly left the building and drove 'home' – to the flat that she had rented down here in Alexandria, since she had moved out of the house. The place still didn't feel like a home to her.

Seven p.m., that meant it four p.m. in Los Angeles.

She took out the phone with the secure line and called the only number that was in the phone's directory.

He didn't pick up.

The lump in her throat got even bigger. She felt guilty for having ended their last call so abruptly, right after he had poured out his heart to her.

The empty flat felt even colder and emptier now. The few pieces of furniture in here were not what she really wanted – they were remains of the last tenant. Awful black color. She had decided to throw the things out five months ago, when she had rented the flat, but up to now she still hadn't found the time or brought up the power to do something about it.

Her whole life was falling apart. Where there had been a beautiful house, a marriage, plans for the future, common friends, a standing in the city's society… all these things were either gone or resting upon fragile pillars that could fall any time.
There she was, just turned forty, at the verge of a divorce, no children, nothing to show for but a job that had been great up to the time when her father had suddenly become her boss. She had fought so hard to get to the position she was in – but suddenly everyone believed it was just because of her father that she had gotten to the place where she was. The bad feeling came over her that even in four or eight years, when the administration would change, everyone would still see her as her father's protégé and nobody would remember that she'd been working on the fourth floor of the Pentagon longer than he had.

Audrey jerked as the phone suddenly rang. Jack. She hurriedly wiped the tears away and picked up.

"Hey."

His voice sounded friendly, almost soft. "Hi.", she silently answered, trying her best not to sound like she had just cried.

He didn't notice. "I'm sorry I missed your call. Was in the shower." He dried his hair with a towel, standing in his room, almost naked.

She was so relieved that she almost couldn't hide it. "I already thought you were mad at me for yesterday night."

"Why would I be?"

"I hung up on you in a quite unfriendly manner."

"Audrey, I told you about five times that you shouldn't leave your friends waiting, so… did they at least buy it?"

"Buy what? That it was a call from work?"

"Yeah."

"I think they did." She started to smile again. It had only been a minute of hearing his voice, and she was already smiling again, every other one of her bad thoughts gone for the moment. It felt like he was on her team, a wingman who'd have her back, no matter how odd her situation was.

She wondered why he had taken a shower at four in the afternoon. "What are you doing all day, Jack?"

"I just came back from running."

"You run?"

"Yeah. A few days ago, I told myself it was time to start exercising again." He sighed and looked into the mirror. It was about time. Not that he considered himself becoming overweight - rather too worn out and reduced to a skeleton. There surely was no gram of fat left on him, after not eating enough throughout these months of drug abuse and being sick all the time throughout withdrawal. He flexed his arm and found that he had lost a lot of muscle, too. The times of being in shape seemed to be gone, the forties gnawing at his body.

"Sounds great.", Audrey's voice told him.

"Yeah, it does. For some.", he laughed. "I guess they guys round here think I'm just stealing away to shoot up again."

"Really? How long were you gone?"

"Four hours, I guess."

"Four hours?" She was really surprised. For a moment, she thought, too, that four hours would be enough to reach some place… get a cab, go to the city and shoot up, get a cab back and run the last few hundred yards to the rehab facility.

"You sound like you're thinking that, too.", he remarked.

"Sorry." The thought had really come across her mind. "Four hours is just a long time."

He had to admit that he so much loved to hear her voice, that he didn't even feel insulted, even though he would have been, if it had been anyone else, saying these words. "I wanted to do twenty miles"

"Twenty? Wow."

"Yeah.", he sighed, and added, "After about seven, I really needed a break. Short before eight, I gave up and dragged myself back here. Took three hours." He wondered why he was so honest. This really wasn't his usual behaviour. But Audrey knew so much about him already – mostly the bad details – that this one more thing wouldn't make him lose his face.

Audrey leant back and closed her eyes. A warm feeling spread around her chest. They were back to where they were, yesterday. She felt like she had her hands deep inside his soul, had penetrated his mind and ended up in a spot that he didn't open up to many others. She was sure that she could ask him questions that he'd never answer, if it was someone else who asked.
"When was the last time you could do twenty miles?", she asked him.

"I could always do twenty miles.", he answered, out of a reflex, but nevertheless he started thinking back. Starting from his youth, his time in the army, in Delta, he had always belonged to the fittest ones. Twenty miles of running? No problem. Carrying a fifty-pound backpack of armory to the top of an Afghan mountain? No problem. Staying awake three nights in a row in some trench? Or just with some comrades in a bar? Nothing that he hadn't done many times.
Maybe during CTU the pressure had become somehow different and his personal resources a bit less, but even at the last physical, at DoD, eight months ago, he'd had no problem to perform well. "Until Mexico.", he finally added – which was only a synonym for saying: until the drugs changed everything.

"What about setting a goal that won't give you the impression of failing?"

"Like lying to myself? You almost sound like that shrink. I'd rather fail than deceive myself." He was determined to get back into shape again. Maybe starting to exercise, to take up running again was that one moment, a few days ago, in which he really made the final decision to leave the drugs behind. "I wanna be able to do this again."

She was entirely glad to hear these words. Instantly, Audrey sensed what he was actually saying with it: getting clean was no longer the goal, but staying clean was now. Getting back in shape was just a little thing to work on, to kill the time. She figured that life in the rehab facility must really be lonesome and boring. "So how's being there? Is there anyone you can talk to, except that shrink you like so much?"

He inevitably had to smile. "Most of the people here are really crazy.", he told her, silently adding, me included. If they knew how many people I've killed and what I've done… I'm just one of them.

"Why, are they still on drugs?"

"All kinds of stuff, I guess. I don't even wanna know why they're here at all. The one next door asked me three times yesterday, if I would sleep with her."

Audrey froze. Hearing him say these words almost felt like a dagger in her heart, as she pictured him, with some other woman. Her stomach tied up into a knot. Jealousy… really? Why? He wasn't more than a one-night stand and probably he'd even had some more one-night stands in between. How come that she suddenly felt that way? Her conscious mind told her to stop it. Don't act childish, she told herself, but inevitably failed. Stop having those feelings. That guy is not worth it.

"What did you answer?", she hesitatingly asked.

"Of course I said no.", he indignantly answered. He shuddered at the thought of sleeping with that woman. Those eyes, lustful but totally empty except for something that had ruled her, either drugs or some other kind of strange addiction. He had the feeling that she didn't even consciously make that decision if or who she wanted to sleep with. Wouldn't it almost be rape if someone said yes to one who couldn't think straight?
Thinking about how many men had probably already had her mad him shudder once more. It was a disgusting thought, dirty in a way that didn't arouse one's lust but killed it. Like if looking at someone already gave you the feeling of catching an STD.

He looked out the window and deep down he realized that he wasn't nearly as much disgusted at the thought of sleeping with that woman as he was disgusted with himself. To him, she was dirty, used, a piece of filth. But he wasn't much better after that time down in Mexico.

"In the past months…. I did a lot of things that I'm really not proud of, Audrey", he silently said.

She held her breath for a moment, sensing that connection to their current topic. "Do you… want to talk about it?", she hesitatingly asked.

"No.", he shook his head slightly, as he sat down on the edge of the bed and looked down on himself, on his almost naked body, the tattoo on his forearm, the crook of his arm where there – for now – were no red puncture marks. "Drugs will make you do things that you can't even speak out loud when you're sober."

Audrey stared at the black cupboard at the other side of the room. She was taken by his words. She wanted him to continue, she wanted him to continue the story that she'd begun to read in those DoD files. She had read so many awful stories already in her life that she was sure she wouldn't be repelled by the things that he'd done, even if lay beyond his imagination now, that he'd ever tell anyone. "You can tell me.", she silently whispered. "I'm used to such stories, Jack."

"It's none of those.", he said and tried to imagine the stories that she meant. She's used to such stories? No, she's used to a different kind of narrative. War stories. The ones of heroes, of traitors and cowards. Severed limbs, lost lives of comrades. Air strikes gone wrong that hit a civilian settlement. Treason. But he couldn't imagine any file in the DoD archives that would even come close to the brutal, narcissistic and constantly intoxicated reality of living within a Mexican drug-cartel.
"Believe me. You're gonna think less of me." Why did he even care? What did it even matter, if she thought less of him? She was just a voice on the phone, thousands of miles away.

"I won't."

It was easy for her to say that – now. But what he was about to tell her, once it was out, it couldn't be made unsaid.
He just felt a certain reluctance to tell her. If he had dug deeper, he might have come to the conclusion that hearing her voice had become the best thing in his life and that he didn't want to lose that. But he didn't allow his mind to go down that road.
If he had really dug deep, he would have come to realize that this was exactly the thing, that had always stood between him and the people close to him: he couldn't tell them what he did. They wouldn't understand. They'd judge him. At the end of the day, they'd see him for what he really was: someone who regularly killed people for a living, or tortured them. No matter what good reason he might have, at one point they'd all tell him to lay down his arms and to quit doing it.

"You have no idea. You'd despise me." The more he thought back, the more he despised himself. This was the hardest part of being clean: remembering what he had actually done throughout those months. He had become one of them. Not that nymphomaniac woman next door was the one to stay away from: he was far worse, more despicable than anyone he could think of.

Like so often, when he thought about his failures, Teri found her way back into his thoughts. He couldn't imagine lying in her arms, looking into her eyes, telling her the things that he'd really done throughout all these years to earn a living for their family. She wouldn't have understood.
He just couldn't imagine lying in bed with her at night, telling her the truth: Honey, I've shot five people today. We believe they were terrorists. I shot a man in both kneecaps to make him talk. Those bruises aren't from a suspect who resisted arrest. It was a lie, when I told you I'd take care of myself. After a certain point, there was only the mission on my mind. There was no split of a second to think about you or Kim or that I'd probably do things that would kill me or rip me away from you both forever.

Confidentiality had always been a blessing. Years ago, he hadn't seen it that way. Of course, Teri had always wanted to know more about what he did. For quite a while, he had even thought so too, that it was confidentiality that drove a wedge into their marriage.
But in the end, confidentiality was the one thing that held this marriage together. He couldn't imagine a world in which he would have told Teri the truth about himself, and she'd still have been with him.

"I won't despise you, Jack. You did what was necessary for the job."

Right, necessary. That was what he always did. And one thing always led to the other. The path down the road always seemed easy in the beginning. You first realize that the path might have been wrong if you look up and see that it made you end up at hell's gates.

You did what was necessary for the job. Teri had used that phrase as well, not often, but she had. He could see her face, sense her presence, almost smell the scent of that hair shampoo that she'd liked so much. Right before his eyes, she was there, and he was back in their house, sitting at the living room couch, in an almost dark room. It was one of the evenings, after he had returned from the Nightfall mission, when he wasn't able any more to hide it, that his job gnawed at his conscience. He knew she meant well, saying it: you did what was necessary for the job. It was the obvious thing to say, the one hollow phrase that she could say, given the little details that she knew about his job. A sentence that was most likely to fit. Like saying it's gonna be fine again to your daughter when she just fell and hurt her knee. Like if she would have said you can't save every one, sometimes it's not in your hands, if he was a surgeon, having come home after a long shift, sitting on the couch, lethargically, starring into the void, like he'd done that night.

Clearance level 9, he remembered. Audrey's current clearance level was even above the one he'd had. Hiding behind that curtain of confidentiality was not an option now.
Right now, it felt awful. He longed back to the times with Teri, when he could just say 'classified' and get away from it all. All his life long, he'd used that legal excuse to keep it at bay, the things he'd really done.

"You have no idea how often I heard that sentence.", he murmured.

"Maybe because it's a valid thing to say?"

"It's not. Doing something for the job is one thing…. but this one totally got out of hand. My cover would have never blown, Audrey, because I really became one of them. I engaged in so…. many things, drug trafficking, arms deals, protection racket…. me and some others, we were sent to beat up people…" as he said it, he knew it was a mild understatement, "we tortured them, if we had orders to. I guess I even killed people. It's nothing that I haven't done before… but these were innocent ones."

"You guess you killed people?"

"I don't know for sure. It's still a blur, like it always was, when I had too much…" he sighed and leant back, lying down on the bed. Something was tieing up his throat, some invisible hands that started to strangle him, whenever he thought back. "Some nights I thought the memories would come back, now that I'm sober, but maybe it's just… imagination, filling the gaps between the few tags of pictures. I can't tell what really happened and what not."

He lay there, starred at the ceiling. Audrey said nothing. There was only silence, and his racing thoughts and memories, of which he couldn't even tell which were real and which were made up by his own mind to tie the loose ends together. Violence wasn't the only bad memory out there – but it ran like a golden thread through all the scenes that he could remember.
He had already told her that much. It didn't matter anymore.
Though the knot in his throat almost kept him from saying it, he confessed "I don't even know how many women I've slept with or how many had their way with me. There's… there's a faint memory…", he took a deep breath, "that I might.. I guess I… even raped a woman… or even more than one."
He really couldn't tell. It was all a blur in his head, a heap of unorganized snippets of a story that he couldn't really make sense of. He could still remember a woman screaming, see a naked body lying on a table, in front of him. There were memories of a struggling woman. They were just as blurred as the scene where he and two others of Ramon's men were digging a grave for someone.

"I remember digging graves and I don't even know who these people were."

Audrey sat there, immovably, still staring at the black wardrobe at the other side of the room. Her own problems suddenly seemed so small and insignificant. An hour ago, she'd cried… because of what? Furniture? A lost house, somebody who had left her life, after years of arguments? That wasn't really a loss, rather a victory of freedom.
It all suddenly seemed so insignificant, compared to the words that she'd just heard.

"I don't know what to say, Jack.", she whispered, after a while.

She heard him breathe.

"It's okay…", he silently answered. Right now, it almost felt okay to have said it all aloud. Why had he? Everyone who knew about this was dead. Ramon was dead. Hector was dead. He had never told Tony or anyone else about these details of the mission. It would have been so easy just to say nothing and keep these pictures buried along with those bodies, somewhere down in the Mexican desert.

"I don't know what to say to make it better. I'm not Dr. Blake."

"Thank god you're not her." Even a small smile made it across his face.

"Wouldn't you want to talk about all this with someone who's… you know, competent to handle that?"

"Never." The thought of telling Dr. Blake what he'd just said to Audrey was unbearable.

"Why not?"

"It's all classified.", his favorite answer burst out of him. That's the curtain behind which he could always hide.
But it was just a lie, he realized.
Being classified wasn't the only reason why he wouldn't tell Dr. Blake. No matter if she was a trained professional, no matter if she was there to help him – these were memories that he'd share with no stranger, not even with a friend. He'd never trust them enough to let them have a share in his thoughts.
What was said, couldn't be made unsaid. He'd come to hate himself for some of the things that he'd done. If they only knew… He couldn't imagine saying all this to Kim. She'd forever see a monster, if she looked into his eyes again after learning the truth.

But somehow, that voice on the telephone was different.