geeky_agent | OOM: Visiting Family

Current Mood: worried

OOM: Visiting Family

She almost wishes Caiti would be there.

It would mean more questions and more problems, yes. They'd still have to explain Caiti having met Jack already in Morocco two years prior and she just knew that wouldn't go over well.

Still, she can't help but wonder if maybe it would be better to get everything out in the open now. (Not everything.) Caiti had always been good at dealing with problems between her sister and brother and it sounded like she and Jack had gotten along pretty well and she hadn't seen her in months...

This had probably been a bad idea but it was too late to back out now.

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"Yeah, it did," Jeannie agrees with a bemused look. "I think that's our cue to head downstairs."

"Not before dinner," he mutters and begins to set the table.

(Turn Page)

For the first time in months, Ryan dreamt of Afghanistan. He's not sure whether to blame the conversation he had with Jack or the memories this place accidentally brought up. Jeannie was there and telling him the patrol route was dangerous and he ignored her advice, sure that he had a good plan of action and then the shooting began. He woke up to the smell of breakfast and was surprised to find Jeannie still sleeping soundly next to him.

Chris sounds amused and Ryan tightens his robe before reaching the kitchen.

"When did you start cooking?"

That would be enough to rankle her but she realizes he's right, so she sighs and keeps her eyes on the road.

"I don't see the turn-off." Just miles of trees and wooded areas. "Are you sure you..."

Chris' mouth snaps shut when she spots the sign a few yards ahead, partially obscured by a tree branch. Mumbling, she adds, "It should be easier to see. Especially during the day."

"Well, I don't care how he feels. I'm older than him, he can deal with it," Chris grumps, pulling her clothes out of her bag.

Chris is surprised to see her brother instead of Jack but laughs anyway. "I could always cook! I just never had much reason to."

Definitely not when she was growing up and living at home. Their mom was a great cook and they were spoiled by her in that regard.

Well, this weekend is getting off to a good start. "Jeannie seems nice; you said you two were friends at West Point?" he says, pulling out a few shirts and hanging them in the closet.

Jack's a little startled, having been lost in thought and not having hear Ryan come in, but he manages a friendly smile. "Upstate New York, yeah. Usually most of the times I got to this side of the country it was on business. It's beautiful."

Ryan glances at him, surprised that he could be easily startled, but files it away for future rumination. He nods and folds his arms. "Yeah, most people think of New York as just the city and forget about the other 99.9 percent of the state. What kind of business were you on?"

Jack sticks his hands in his pockets, turning toward Ryan. "Conferences or collaborations with the New York CTU office. Mostly the former, though. Didn't leave a lot of time to get out of the city."

"That's one of the nice things about teaching, I don't get stuck spending time in office buildings," Ryan's quiet for a moment. "You didn't work in the New York office?"

Jack shakes his head. "No; visited it a few times, but I worked in the L.A. office."

"With my father?" Ryan asks before he can think through the implications.

"Yeah, he was at Division most of the time I was at CTU," Jack says, unable to keep his tone from getting a little subdued, though hopefully not suspiciously so. Enough for remembering a former coworker who'd been killed in the line of duty.

"He didn't talk about his work much, but he used to say that CTU was responsible for his premature-mature balding," Ryan smiles slightly in remembrance and then sobers. "Were you at the funeral?"

Jack shakes his head. "I wanted to but couldn't. We lost a lot of people that day and there was still a lot of cleanup work to handle," he says.

It's a bold-faced lie; he hadn't been there because he couldn't face Ryan's kids and particularly because he was going through detox at the time. But then he's had a lot of experience putting together a cover, unfortunately this isn't much different. Either that or he'd have to admit to the heroin addiction and like that would go over well.

Ryan realizes his sister's dating a man who was too busy to attend his father's funeral. "Right. Did you meet Chris when she worked at Division?"

"When she went to Division a year ago, yeah," Jack says with a nod. He knows what Ryan's trying to do and throws him a bone. "The first time she worked there I'd already moved to the Department of Defense."

Ryan nods in return, but the mention of the DoD sets off warning bells. He wants to like Jack, for Chrissy's sake, but there's something about him that doesn't feel right, and he decides that when he gets back to a net connection he'll have to do a little Lexis Nexis research.

"So you're back at CTU:LA now," he lets a few moments of silence pass. "Were you there when she went AWOL a few months ago?"

Jack manages to not shift his feet uncomfortably, though there's a moment where he can't help but glance away. "I wasn't in L.A. at the time. I was on a... kind of sabbatical. And I don't work at CTU anymore."

Ryan might not be a trained interrogator, but he is a lawyer. "Good, Chris needs influences outside of that place," he relaxes a little. "She still won't tell us anything about where she went or what happened." He pauses. "Have you noticed anything different about her?"

Jack's quiet for a moment, trying to decide what to say. "I have, yeah. She's been doing a lot better, recently, though. And I don't think it's that she won't tell you, it's that she can't," he says, softly.

"That's the government's favorite line," Ryan says after a moment. "The justice department tried to recruit me after seeing my Bar scores and I told them to go to hell. If you cared about her, you'd get her to leave."

"Yeah, someone should hack that branch off," he says, bracing himself a little as Chris has to slow down pretty quickly to safely make the turn. "So what exactly does Ryan like to do when he's not working?" It might help if there's some common ground between them, somewhere.

Jack takes a deep breath, trying to think of how he can reply diplomatically. "I do care about her, and I do worry about her working at CTU. But I know she wasn't happy working in the private sector, and I know this is what she wants to do; that she knows the risks and wants to do something to try and make a difference."

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OOM: Visiting Family

Re: Jeannie-Chris Conversation

Re: Ryan-Jeannie Conversation

(Turn Page)

Re: Chris-Ryan Conversation

Re: The Meeting

Re: Jack-Chris Conversation

Re: Chris-Ryan Conversation

Re: Jack-Chris Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation

Re: The Meeting

Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation