President injured, no word from anyone, entire country in danger, and she keeps looking at the clock.
Kim opens her eyes and sits up slowly. She starts to stand but she feels like she's moving through molasses. She doesn't want to think of what that dream might mean. Instead, she forces herself to get ready and go downstairs.
Kim's in the shower, the water is the hottest she can stand and she can still feel goosebumps on her arms. She has seen a side of herself that she didn't want to face, didn't want to think existed.
If she thought her dad was psychotic, how does she categorize someone willing to alter someone's memories and emotions to 'help' them?
And she had been talking about it so calmly, as if playing with her dad's mind was something without consequences, or another theraputic option.
She feels nauseated remembering how tempting it sounded. If she can make him forget what she said, maybe some of the things that happened, he will be happier. But he wouldn't really be himself either. And if her dad ever found out...
"No!" she says out loud, pushing away the thought of even considering this option.
'But you asked Chase to get his memories altered...' a soft voice whispers in her mind.
"That was different, he wanted to, he offered..." she realizes that she's talking to herself.
"It's a betrayal. No, forget that, it's evil..."
She turns off the water and wraps herself in a towel. Still shivering a little, she wipes off the mirror and looks at her reflection.
'I'm his daughter, I can't be considering something this wrong.'
She knows how fragile memories are and how the only reason she's able to survive is Elaine's gift.
And her dad, he would never forgive her. No, he'd consider her his enemy and with very good reason. Only someone who had no concern for him could even think about altering his memories or whatever else Jasin can do.
She would be doing it to help him, but she could never live with herself and the secret even if it worked. She knows that, but she's so worried about him that she has to put him out of her mind. And there's the issue of Jasin himself, whose motives and actions weren't always on the side of angels.
Her mom told her to remind her dad of who he was if he ever forgot. But there has to be another way and she can't be seriously considering Jasin's offer.
"I can't take back what I said but I'm not going to *erase* it from his moemory." She tells her reflection.
She goes into her bedroom and puts on jeans, a t-shirt and a sweatshirt. She has discovered a coldly logical place inside of her mind. She's not sure if she'll ever be warm again.
She leaves to go down to the bar.
But she's in her room now.
She misses having blonde hair. The red hair still isn't familiar. If she turns quickly she sometimes doesn't recognize herself.
The door to the room opens and she hears Chris's voice.
She knows it's time to be alone. Or at least to try to be alone.
Ryan both dead and alive. Tony both alive and dead. Chase recovering or in jail and her dad either working in DC or a wanted terrorist that she saw murdered in front of her.
She shivers at that thought. The images might never leave her mind, but Tony said he saw him. If her dad was haunting her, it wouldn't make any sense for other people to see him or talk to him. Especially not in the way Tony was describing.
However, if he is alive, or at least not a figment of her imagination, he would be here now that she's alone since Chris went to get something. But, he's not and if he's not...and Tony saw him...she isn't sure what's going on. But, if he was haunting her, he wouldn't exist in a place, he would just appear...
A little voice in her head says, 'Go see if he's in his room'.
She closes her eyes, trying not to cry because really, she...if he's not there, if he's dead, really dead, there are so many people she suddenly can't trust.
But she has to know. So she opens the door, really looking at her surroundings for the first time in days and she goes.
Kim wakes up in darkness. She feels the ground moving underneath her and realizes that she's blindfolded.
'Oh God'.
She stifles a scream, 'don't panic,' she thinks. But that's a hard command for her mind to follow, especially when this brings up so many bad memories.
Her heart's pounding and her head aches. She feels tape over her mouth and her hands are restrained behind her and she forces back a wave of nausea. She breathes through her nose, but she knows it's too fast, knows that she needs to calm down but hysteria is creeping around the corner.
'How did I get here?'
At least answering that will stave off the panic attack. She remembers walking out of a bar and then...nothing.
No, there's something, a vauge recollection of being hurt (beaten, her mind supplies).
She feels the impossibility of her situation. She knows this can't end well. If they accidentally picked her up, fighting them would give them an excuse to hurt her more. If it wasn't accidental...her stomach turns at the thought.
She feels herself stop moving and there are footsteps outside and her legs are free but she doesn't know how many there are or where they even are and she didn't wear the gun.
Hands around her arms and she's being pulled through a door and down a walkway and then a flight of stairs and she feels herself being pushed onto a chair. Her head rocks forward and back and she lets out a soft moan of pain behind the gag.
She can smell sweat and blood and...a man's cologne?
Her hands are untied and her left hand is seized in a powerful grip. The blindfold is removed and when she looks up she can't stop herself from struggling.
Ramon Salazar is standing in front of her.
She's seen his picture in files, she's read reports of what he's done to people who cross him and he's looking at her in a way that makes her skin crawl.
"We just have a couple of questions and then you're free to go." His accent is softer than she expected.
He leans forward and pulls the tape off her mouth and she flinches at the thought of him touching her.
She doesn't say anything. She just looks at him.
"Jose," he says and her pinky is forced back, too far back and she hears the snap before she feels the pain.
"Shall we try that again?"
Her heart's racing and she's trying not to focus on her hand.
Salazar looks at the man standing next to her and another finger breaks. She tries not to scream but she tastes copper from where she bit her lip.
"Where did you get the money?"
She continues looking at him and decides it's okay to speak since she has no idea of the true answer and this isn't a matter of national security. "What money?"
He laughs and lights a cigar, "The money in your bag,"
"I don't know."
He wraps his hand around her throat and holds the lit end of the cigar near her eye. "It's a simple question, where did you get the money?"
She tries to think but can't remember and the lack of memory suddenly frightens her because it's a gap she can't explain - she has a sudden flash of watching a dark haired woman paint near a lake - but the money just seemed to have appeared. She's starting to have all these strange flashes of memory or hallucinations. How could she know what it felt like to kiss Tony? She has this odd image of her parents together and knows that she must have snapped.
Instead, she stares at the ash, knowing that if she doesn't say something Ramon will blind her.
"Why do you want to know?" she whispers.
"Because it's my money. And it's missing from an account that only three people knew about,"
"I swear I don't know how I --"
He glared at her with flat eyes, "Do you know what your father used to do to people who lied to me?"
Before she could move, he crushed the cigar against the back of her hand and this time she did scream, feeling the heat eat through her skin and knowing for certain that there was no way out.
She looked around at the men with guns and wanted to cry.
"I don't know anything I swear I don't know..." Her hand is making her forget any other pain she had or ever had experienced
Her right hand is cuffed to the chair and against her will she tries to pull away.
"You've heard from him?"
"No,"
"I don't believe you."
"I'm not lying, I haven't heard from him, I swear that I haven't..." Another finger breaks and she can't stop the tears.
Salazar's hand grips her chin and forces her to look at him. "Do you think I'd really take the word of a Bauer? You're a liar, just like your father."
She glares at him through watery eyes, "You have no idea what my dad's like," she whispers.
He laughs, "I think you're the one who doesn't know him," He places his hand on her knee and squeezes gently, "But you will."
Someone hands him a syringe and she struggles to get away.
"Addiction is bad enough, but addiction when so many dealers have died of the disease? Not a kind fate. "
"Please, I don't know anything, I came down here to find him, I haven't seen him I..."
He's too close to her, his breath against her ear, "I could tell you what your father used to do for a fix..."
She feels his hand on her throat and he's pressing down and the world's starting to get dimmer.
'I'm going to die here,' But it's more of a shock when she realizes a quick death is the only way to keep from experiencing more pain.
He lets go and she falls forward, gasping for air. The syringe is still in his hand.
Kim opens her eyes and turns towards the wall. Her heart's still racing from the dream.
It's possible that she got back to her own bed not very long ago, but she's wide awake now. She may go down to the bar soon.
Kim walks into her room and grabs a sweater from the closet. She's having trouble getting warm. She is still shivering and crawls under blankets, hoping that will help.
"And you know what? You go wait until he's got a gun to your head and he's willing to pull the trigger and blow your brains out for the safety of millions of people, and then you come back and say that to me again. Okay? Because it's real fuckin' easy for you to say that when you know you're never going to be in the same position."
She hears Chase's angry voice in her mind and tries to get warm.
Kim goes back to her room and sits on the edge of her bed, cradling her head in her hands.
'I was avoiding him for a reason, dad,' she thinks, finding it hard at this moment not to dislike him for pushing her. Because apparently he has this odd obsession wtih honesty now and facing demons and all kinds of things that Kim didn't want to face after standing on the edge of a nervous breakdown. All these things Kim was trying not to think about while her mom was in the Bar. Her mom. The only person she'd wanted to see for months, the one who haunted her in a thousand tiny ways every day, her mom, someone she thought she'd never see again in this life. But fate had brought them here and her mom had found them. She loved her so deeply and truly that she could never put it into words.
For a few moments, for a few days even she was happy and she'd not felt that happy in years - at one point could never imagine being so happy. She had Chase, she had her mom, she kind of had her dad and it felt *so* right and true and good and that empty space that had opened in her heart after her mom's murder was sealed.
She couldn't feel sadness or anger while looking at mom's laughing face or listening to her speak. There was something so calm and comforting about her presence that it pushed every bad feeling away.
Her mom told her that she knew that Kim had always loved her and that was a relief because Kim'd never been entirely sure that she knew, so many things they never really got to say, like goodbye.
So she didn't want to waste a moment of her mom being there, didn't want to take it up with the baggage of the past few weeks and the pain that seemed to be served as readily as drinks and food.
Most wonderful of all was the absense of nightmares. Her sleep had been almost dreamless over the past few days and after the last week or two she needed that, needed that very badly.
But she is also finding it difficult not to hate Tony. She finds it hard to view the way he treated her as anything but manipulative and it is so obvious that he doesn't care about hurting her, about driving her into a near catatonic state, about anyone's feelings but his own.
When she sat on the floor with her dad, he told her that he was upset but would never do anything because he *knew* it would hurt her. Tony didn't care, so wrapped up in his own feelings of guilt and lonliness that if she let him, he'd crush her too.
Which is why she knew she had to stay away, because his sadness was a black hole and she cared more about him than she wanted to admit. But her dad forced her hand and made her go see him, even though she was trying not to, even though part of her thought that if she avoided the problem it never existed because goddamn it she just wanted a few days where other people weren't slowly killing her.
'Isn't what why you left home?'
She covers her hand with her mouth and makes a soft almost whimpering sound. Her dad said he doesn't blame her, but how can he not? And her mom, her mom watching from wherever must have been so disappointed in her and now she's letting someone else slip away because she can't face talking to Tony, can't face seeing him because every time she does it kind of feels like she's gone up against a Dementor.
"I don't want to cry anymore. I don't want to feel this way..." she whispers into her hands and curls onto her bed, looking at the wall, blinking away tears.
"Please, don't..." Kim's mumbling in her sleep and then wakes up, her clothes are drenched with sweat and her hands hurt from having them in fists. She opens her hand to see half-moon marks on her palms.
She sits up, brushing back wet hair and covers her face with her hands.
Kim turns over and wraps her arms around herself, trying to get warm. The images of that nightmare have chilled her. She shudders. 'Can'tsavebothmaybecan'tsaveeither' she thinks and gets up to take a warm shower.
She goes to the sink and turns on the water, but it runs red...no, blood is on her hands, why are her hands covered in blood?
She looks up into the mirror, the first time in days, but instead of blue eyes she sees green and instead of blonde hair, her hair is now dark.
Terrified, she takes a step back and runs back to the bed. Tony's not moving.
"Tony..." she shakes him and her hands touch something wet -- and he's not breathing...and there's a shadowy figure in the corner of the room.
And she sees the gun. And the look in her dad's eyes. And she screams.
And is now awake.
Dad's memories aren't hers. She can't even imagine if those memories are possible now and wonders if like in Back to the Future, the memories will fade in his mind. If a picture taken of them at that time would slowly vanish. She can't remember ever feeling this guilty, a secret she can't ever tell him, not after that conversation. And forget about dad, if Chase ever found out...she used to love his smiles but he hasn't smiled in a while and she's barely seen him between physical therapy and searching for a new job and....
Stupidly, she thought her dad would understand, that maybe he saw the change in Chase but no...apparently a year from now and everything is okay. Better than okay.
But she's not a woman who has been married for 20 years. Still, she forgot that she wasn't alone, that she wasn't single, that she couldn't just...do what she wanted.
She takes a breath and lets it out, her hands near her face, she doesn't want to get up.
And she remembers falling in love with Chase...the excitement and the danger and...
Now there's Tony and Tony's so different from Chase and she feels so safe in his arms and electrified at the same time.
If Chase knew it would break his heart, but the memories her dad has she doesn't yet and maybe she jumped into this thing with Tony but she can't...let him go.
She goes to sleep.
( Nightmare )
Kim wakes up alone. She turns over and stares at the pillow, not really wanting to move. Her heart's racing. That felt...way too real.
There's a knock on her door.
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timeasmymeasure
