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August 3rd, 2008
09:05 pm - Fic. 24. "My Kind of Town"
"My Kind of Town"
24, Jack, PG-13ish, post-Day 4
Summary: How far will you wander before you go home again?
Love to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) catch22girl who eggs me on.
Jack comes in the back door of the bar and yanks off his gloves. He rubs his hands together, trying to boost circulation, while he makes his way through the back room to the public area. Along the way, Jack takes off his coat and drops it on the chair in his corner. It's only five in the afternoon and the bar is nearly empty. Another two hours and the regulars will begin to pour in, usual seats, usual drinks. The owner, Tom, is tending bar tonight, since it's Tuesday. Jack gives him a nod and Tom returns it with a smile, coming around from behind the bar.
"Cold 'nough out there for ya, Frank?"
Jack snickers and sits on the piano bench, still rubbing his hands together. "My gloves are a foot thick and I can't feel my fingers yet."
"Welcome to Chicago, Beach Boy," Tom laughs. He hands Jack a glass of scotch and watches as Jack takes a generous sip and nods gratefully. "S'long as your fingers still work, I guess we'll keep ya."
Jack chuckles and rolls his eyes. He's been working here for six months and Tom's taken a liking to him. A liking to Frank, anyways. Jack doesn't doubt that he could do this for the rest of his life. He almost enjoys it, until he remembers that he wakes everyday hoping that it will be his last.
Jack warms up while he does the same to his piano. He settles himself in, talking with Tom during their prep time. Tom chats about his wife, Annmarie, and their two boys. Greg is seven and a fledging bookworm. Jason is six and wants nothing but for it to be time for Little League again. Cubs fans, the whole family. The whole neighborhood. They're slowly converting Frank. Frank comes from Florida-- he's the crazy Marlins fan. Jack suddenly wonders what happened to his Dodgers sweatshirt and the thought startles him. He has treated his life since the train tracks as an extended undercover operation-- he is now Frank Flynn, and while he is Frank, he is not Jack Bauer. There can be no thought of his other life, no matter how fleeting, or he could give himself away.
Except that, in missions past, there had always been Jack Bauer to go back to.
Tom invites him over for dinner on Sunday. Annmarie's making chicken marsala again. Frank says sure. He's done it before. He thinks it might have been a mistake. He's growing too fond of these people.
He'll go over on Sunday and eat chicken marsala and Annmarie's divorced sister will be there with her baby and the scar above her eye. Jack will think about killing her ex-husband even as he tries to let her down easy. No one will mention the fact that Jack and Ava are the only single people at Sunday dinner and Annmarie will want to talk. Jack's never been good at that but he forces Frank to fake it well enough. He just doesn't like to because it violates his undercover rule. To be quiet-- to be evasive and purposely mysterious-- for that, Jack needs no counsel. To small talk, to befriend and reveal small pieces of himself while staying so intensely private-- that's a hat trick. That requires example. That requires leaving Jack behind and instead becoming a little bit of Tony Almeida.
Tom goes on, saying that it's only two days after Valentine's Day, so everyone who comes in that night will be depressed and cynical. Jack didn't realize that it was mid-February already. He had been sure that it was only the seventh, at best. He has never slipped like that before-- he has to stay on top of it... but what is the point? If one day, he forgot time and didn't get out of bed, no one would really notice. Tom already thinks Frank a harmless nut case and Jack is content to keep it that way. He has fed him a vague, virtually detail-free, "modest genius with a meltdown" story that he cooked up, after watching 'A Beautiful Mind' in a hotel room at four in the morning. He had let Chloe get a few details in place, just in case. He talks to Chloe once a month, and she is beginning to feel further and further away. As far as Tom is concerned, Frank Flynn had worked in some over-everyone's-head scientific research job for the government before he flipped. Around the time he lost his wife in something that Jack thinks might be a car accident. He called it "an accident", the one time the subject of love had came up. He used the pain of Frank's fake, dead wife to shut down and go home as soon as possible, when really Jack just could not stop thinking that Teri wasn't an accident. Even as another man, Jack had thought, he can't stop betraying her.
"So you should probably play some bittersweet tunes tonight, my friend."
"I still am not playing 'Piano Man'."
Tom laughs. "We will get you to, one night. Maybe even sing."
"When the Cubs win."
Tom's grin flashes as he wipes down the bar. Frank returns one of half-effort and aching; he quickly averts his eyes to the piano pedals at his feet. Jack's breath catches and he knows, without a doubt, that this is how they will find him. He will let his guard down-- he already has, just by choosing Chicago of all cities. They will know he is not with Kim or Chloe, not with Graem or their father. They will know he is not with Tony and Michelle. They will know that Jack is alive and drifting. He cannot go home but they will know that he has to go home somehow. He almost hopes that they do-- even after his friends risking so much to keep him safe-- because Jack wonders if it wasn't a mistake. They might have given freedom to Frank Flynn but inside him, Jack Bauer is still slowly bleeding out.
It is an illusion of home, yes, but at least that illusion. It's a familiar smile in Tom, even if it's not exactly the one Jack misses-- it's an accent, a home team, a neighborhood not his own, but one comfortable by association. It's the hope that Annmarie will one night, if he agrees to stay for coffee after dinner, pull the tattered photo albums down from the shelf, to show him the kids when they were even smaller than they are now. Jack would look and inflect in the right places-- chuckling at Greg smushing cake over his highchair, smiling at Jason's school portraits. He'll plot a way to see Annmarie and Tom's small, white, wedding album. He'll listen to the stories, because stories always come with pictures. History, a subject for which Jack has appreciation though they will suspect Frank does not. Annmarie, always a bit intimidated by his quiet, will politely try to beg off a story she's already started but Frank will insist. No, no, go on. Really. A small smile. Frank does want to know. He'll spot them somewhere in the album, Jack knows he will, because they were there. There had been a crisis, an attempted bombing at LAX, and they were a half-hour late to the ceremony, but they made it. Tony and Michelle are somewhere in the wedding album, on the shelf, above the cookbooks, and Tom, with the dark, shiny eyes shared by his cousin, is there, everyday, in Frank's life, like maybe the world has just shifted and everything shook out upside-down. Jack became Frank, sun became snow, the Dodgers morphed into the Cubs, but Tony's cousin is just a replacement, even if he can't help it. Maybe he can grow into more. Maybe he will become Frank's best friend and one day, they will have known one another for years. They will have a shorthand, a shared mind, and secrets of their own. Frank would like that but Jack knows, truly knows, that you can't love again if you're still empty. Frank is empty because Jack has nothing to give him.
Jack swirls the last of his scotch and drinks it. He is a scotch drinker.
That much will not change.
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