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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Ryan's anticipating the day that Tori asks for a dog of her own. Once she gets old enough to use the 'But Aunt Caiti had one' line, he knows part of his time will be spent taking care of the dog and he'll wind up walking it around their Long Island neighborhood during a Nor'easter. Listening to her talk about Baby, though, he thinks that if it makes her happy he'll gladly take on the responsibility.

Jeannie tries to start conversation that doesn't involve Tori but it fails quickly and after dinner Jeannie takes the opportunity of a free babysitter to get some alone time with a new book. Ryan looks out the kitchen window, wishing she stayed, but it's a not-so-subtle hint that, 'Do you want the mustard?' doesn't count as getting to know Chrissy's boyfriend.

Ryan turns away from the window and heads into the living room. Jeannie mentioned that Jack worked at CTU and Ryan has the uncomfortable feeling that he knows more about them than he'll ever divulge. When they get back home, Ryan thinks, he might have to do some investigation of his own.

"Is this your first time up here?"

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."

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."

"There are many ways to make a difference." Ryan wishes he was holding something in his hand, like a pen, so this would feel less awkward. "You have to understand, Jack, it just about killed my baby sister when our dad died, and Chris keeps putting her life in danger. If you knew her years ago, you wouldn't say that she was happy now. She's changed. If you could leave, why can't she?"

Jack feels a twinge of guilt at the mention of Caiti, but pushes it aside, trying to focus on the issue at hand. "Because it's not what she wants to do. Because she feels that she needs to be there, and I respect that. I know what it's like," he says, purposely trying to keep his voice calm and even, not argumentative.

Ryan doesn't raise his voice. "There's a difference between respecting someone and letting them self-destruct. What made you leave, if you feel you need to be there?"

"I didn't have much of a choice. I was in field work, and I was looking at future medical problems if I kept doing it. Besides, my priorities had shifted," Jack says with a shrug, trying to make it sound simple, like it was no big deal.

"Doing field work didn't leave a lot of time for much else, and around the same time, a good friend of ours needed help running her security business."

It's a good answer and Ryan gets a new understanding of him. "That's one of the reasons why I'm trying to leave law. Tori was sick one night and I was stuck in the office reading hundreds of pages of transcripts on a case that in the end meant nothing. Jeannie had to deal with it alone and she wound up taking Tori to the ER. I couldn't be there for either of them, and Jeannie understood but I wanted to be with them more than I wanted to win any case. Priorities do change." Ryan realizes he revealed something of himself instead of continuing to cross-examine.

Jack nods, glad that Ryan had gone with the 'changing priorities' explanation, and not asked about the medical reasons in more detail. He's not sure Ryan would really appreciate hearing that Chris' new, older boyfriend also had a heart condition.

"Chris said you're teaching now?" he says, posing it as a question as if looking for confirmation that he remembered correctly.

Ryan notices the subject change but he goes along with it. "Yeah, business law, which I'm only doing because they needed someone and fundamental legal concepts, which I find a lot more interesting. Eventually I hope to get into teaching constitutional law. I know that certain people in government want to amend the constitution, but I'm not sure they understand it in the first place."

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Re: Jack-Ryan Jr. Conversation