fanofthegenre | [ where it begins ]

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jack bauer

[ where it begins ]

She needs to change. She keeps a spare set of clothes at the 12th - but they're meant for the shifts where she pulls an all-nighter and doesn't have time to go home.

They're not for this, for the red that stains the white of her sweater - someone else's (I'm fine, Castle, it's not my blood). She was just supposed to have a conversation. She'd hoped it was one that would bring her a little closer to the truth.

Instead, she's got one more murder on her hands, and more questions than answers.

She's not expecting the door to the Bar when she walks in, but a part of her is almost relieved. She needs a place to decompress, to think about her options and to consider her next move before she heads back out into her world, into the place where all of it becomes real again and everyone's counting on her to step up, relying on her to tell them where to go from here.

Because, right now, Beckett's not even sure she knows what to do.

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"I don't know," she sighs.

"He was shot before he could get to the details of just what it was that went wrong."

"Guess the first step is to find the case he mentioned, nineteen years ago. Something that connects with your mother somehow."

"And who better to get the truth from than the people he used to work with, right? If I can even track one of them down after all this time."

She quickly takes another sip of coffee.

"Either way, it's a start."

"His old cases will have to mention every cop that worked with him. From there, NYPD has to have some kind of pension records, right?" He mirrors her action, taking a sip of his coffee and wishing it was an Irish.

"Yeah, it's a start."

His main worry is how far she's going to get down this trail before someone decides she's getting too close.

"If they've got a record of it, we'll find it. But I have a sinking feeling that Raglan did a lot of things off the books back then, and unless I can sit someone down who was a personal eyewitness, I won't be able to get any answers in a file or on record."

She leans back in her chair, fingers tapping on the side of her mug.

"A couple hours ago, I thought this was going to be just another day."

"Yeah, they usually start that way."

He remembers the feeling well; that feeling of starting another day completely unaware of what's about to hit you until you're knee-deep in it. Playing chess with Kim and slinging his arm around Teri's shoulders as they went to talk to Kim about her disrespecting her mother. Waking up with Audrey curled next to him, trying to keep their hands off each other and get dressed for the day so they wouldn't be late, make her father suspicious. Having breakfast with Diane, his biggest problem dealing with Derek's attitude towards him.

Those little everyday moments that made you fall into complacency, made you look back later and wonder how everything could change so much in just a few heartbeats.

It's the kind of moment that rings eerily true of the day her mother died - a day that, even up to now, she can remember as strongly as if it had happened just yesterday, when she and her father had come home and found Raglan waiting for him. He'd looked older, at the diner, been older - but, interestingly, maybe ironically, the haggard expression in his gaze was still the same as it had been all those years ago.

She glances to Jack.

If I could, I'd have you right there with me.

"Can I show you something?"

"Yeah, what?" Jack asks, cocking an eyebrow in her direction.

She picks up her coffee - there are a million reasons she shouldn't be doing this, after their earlier conversation - and nods toward the stairs.

"Up there," she murmurs, signaling he needs to follow.

That doesn't help his curiosity any, and he slides off the stool, leaving his coffee.

"Okay, let's go," he says, turning toward the stairs.

Her room isn't a far distance from the stairs - however, she suspects that one's room is never difficult to find, regardless of what number graces the outside of the door.

She bypasses the living room entirely once they get inside, making a beeline straight for her bedroom - and then her closet in turn, waiting for him to stop alongside her as she stands in front of the closed doors, drawing in a breath.

"There's something I've been working on for a while now - back home, too. But I made copies and brought them here, in case - "

In case my apartment got blown-up again, is what she fails to say, and instead she pulls open the doors, revealing the replica of the murder board in her own apartment, crime scene photos and construction paper covered in Beckett's handwriting taped to the inside.

For a moment, Jack's surprised by what he sees inside her closet. He hadn't really known what she was going to show him when he came up, though he would have thought she'd duct-tape him to a chair to make sure he couldn't follow her before he would have thought of this.

But then, looking at the evidence, the surprise fades and he's sucked in. The investigator in him is pulling him toward it, absorbing the evidence, looking for patterns, clues, leads.

Of course the first thing he sees are the crime scene photos, and he knows without reading the note next to it which one is her mother.

"You've put all this together? Since when?"

"Over the summer," she explains, stepping back, her eyes scanning over the all-too familiar names and dates for what feels like the millionth time. "Didn't have anything else to occupy myself with, and I just - "

Johanna Beckett
Murdered On Saturday, January 9, 1999
In an Alley on the Lower West Side

" - started to try and see if I could find a connection, somehow, between my mom and the others."

The look he gives her is a searching, maybe slightly concerned one. Not that he can blame her for spending time off the job studying everything she can about her mom's case, but he knows it's possible to go a little too far down that rabbit hole.

"And you found one?" he says, pointing to a piece of paper mentioning two of the victims having volunteered with her mother on something called the Justice Initiative.

"The third, he was a document clerk at the courthouse," she adds, nodding slowly.

"Up until now, I'd always thought the connection was a case they all would've been working on together. And then I found out that my mother requested a court file just before she was killed - a file which has since disappeared."

"I take it you never found a mention of what that file was or what she was working on that might have related to it."

"I went through everything she had nine years ago, all her personal files and business papers," she says, shaking her head. "There was nothing."

"And the people who knew what it was are dead," Jack says, looking at the victims' photos; the ones taken when they were alive.

"Probably pretty safe to assume it's whatever case Raglan was trying to tell you about."

Her gaze joins his at the same place on the board, glancing over faces as well as the names attached to them.

"That'd be my guess. And until I figure out exactly what it was, I'm not going to get any closer to the truth than I am right now."

"So that's where you start."

He gives her a sidelong look. "I don't want you to stop investigating. I knew that wasn't going to happen. I just want you to be careful, and I want to be there to help."

And to help keep you safe.

"Right."

She looks away from the closet doors.

"I know. And I don't want to risk any more lives than I absolutely have to."

Especially yours.

"Shouldn't that be my decision?"

"Jack - "

Beckett lifts her gaze to his face, then turns, a curtain of dark hair falling forward over one shoulder.

"Don't."

Jack clenches his teeth together for a moment, trying to hold in his frustration. He knows this isn't easy for her, he knows that. He's not purposely trying to make it harder. But the thought of staying in here and waiting for her to come back in to tell him what's going on, the thought of doing nothing makes him feel as though the walls are closing in.

"Beckett..." He sighs, staring at a spot on the wall over her shoulder. "This was why when I came in here I didn't want to get close to anyone; because I didn't want to...care about someone and have something happen to them, especially when I couldn't do anything to stop it. I don't want anything to happen to you."

"Well, forgive me for throwing a wrench into your plans," she says, with a little more bite than she originally intends, though the emotion in her eyes doesn't quite match up with her tone when she turns to him.

"I get it, okay? I've been there. I know how it feels to lose someone you care about, someone you lo - "

Something in her voice breaks and she pauses, reeling, trying to regain control of a situation that's spun out of her grasp long before this conversation even started tonight.

"I didn't expect anything like this to happen when I met you."

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