Day 16, 26,758 words, lost in the backstory

Today I was writing more backstory for Jackie. A lot of the backstory I have written until now has been how Jack and Anna's paths diverged... today was the moment when Jackie and Annalise's paths change direction, and move back toward each other- in the past. Still lots of things to happen in the present day. So, where I left off, Jackie was beginning his training.  As he becomes a professional operative, he ends up feeling pretty empty and hopeless:

And so the years went by, and Jackie’s memory of who he was when he was Jack Bauer, his memory of Anna, his memory of the sacrifice he had made to give her a chance at a life so different from where his had led him, these all faded. The faded until they no longer seemed real, until they seemed like a beautiful dream best forgotten upon waking, lest they cast a light on the ugliness of your real life. He came to believe that he would continue the work, always moving, always running, until he died. Men like him had a short life expectancy, which he came to view as a blessing, really. And then something happened that changed everything.

Mr. Black comes back onto the scene:

“I want to show you something, Jackie,” he said in his signature whispery voice. “I have been watching you for years now, and you have impressed me very much.” He hated it, but Jackie felt something like pride when Mr. Black said that. He was the closest thing that Jackie had to a mentor, and had always been the standard he tried to live up to, as hateful as it was. Sometimes, when a flower is left to grow in the darkness, it moves toward whatever feeble light it finds, and Jackie had been left in the dark for a long, long time. “I want you to understand the lengths we go to in order to get what we want- to get what we need, in order to do this work. I think you can go far, Jackie. I think you can go very far indeed. But I need to know if you have what it takes.”

Mr. Black shares some information about Jackie's past, testing Jackie to see if he 'has what it takes'.

On the outside, Jackie looked the same as ever. Cold, calculating, cruel even. He didn’t flinch, he didn’t move at all. But inside, something shifted, a permanent change that could never be undone. Whatever Jackie had felt for Mr. Black moments before, whatever twisted dynamic they had shared over the years as teacher and pupil, it was done. Jackie felt pure, unadulterated hatred. He felt it so intensely he wondered that Mr. Black wasn’t immediately struck dead with the force of it. He felt it pouring out of him in waves, burning away the man he had been in its heat. The staff psychiatrist had warned him that the awakening of feelings could be a dangerous thing for people in his profession, and she had been right. For just as the hatred burned through him, something else broke free. He thought of Anna, the injustice of what had been done to her, to him, to them both. He thought of the years they had needlessly spent apart, and he felt a love so blinding he almost fell to his knees.

“I see,” is what he said. Mr. Black nodded curtly, and the man with the scar went back through the door he had come through, fading out of the alleyway as though he had never been there at all. Mr. Black looked pleased at Jackie’s response, and when Jackie turned to leave, he let him go. They were men of action, not of words, and Mr. Black believed that he knew Jackie, knew him to his core, and he saw in Jackie a soul that was as black and twisted as his own. How wrong he was. How sadly, fatally wrong.

Jackie returned to his hotel room, and retrieved one of the many burner phones he carried with him at all times. He removed the packaging, and dropped it in the hotel lobby as he crossed toward the doors to the street. He looked up at the dazzling blue sky, and dialed a number he had committed to memory many years before.

“I need you to find her,” he said into the phone in a low, whispery voice. He ended the call, snapped the phone in half and tossed it into one of the waste bins that lined the canal.

The next day, as Jackie boarded the plane to leave Vienna, the beginnings of a plan forming in his mind, he felt something he almost didn’t recognize. It was hope.