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It’s been four days. Four days of worrying and screaming and just utter silence where there should have been, was supposed to be life. And now here he is, ordered to sleep, ordered to lie down in his bed and close his eyes no matter how easily Jack could tell them that sleep will elude him. Not allowed in the halls of GD for at least six hours, which is just stupid. Jack can’t sleep, can’t relax, can’t close his eyes without seeing Allison’s face at that damn porthole watching him bash the glass on the coolant tank, believing he would save them all again. But it didn’t work. He failed. And he hates to think, hates to contemplate it, but the likelihood that she had time to get into that damn secure chair, the likelihood that she had time to strap herself down after she had stood there for minutes watching Jack, believing in Jack…. well it was pretty damn low.
But Jack can’t think about that, can’t contemplate that because he honestly doesn’t know how (if) he’d live with the guilt, the knowledge that if she’d just gone straight to that chair, hadn’t had so much damn faith in him… (And then there’s that spiteful voice inside of him saying you’ve done it before, you’ve caused someone’s death before and you lived through it. Found happiness and contentment again when she never can. And that’s on your shoulders, all on you, Jack.) Stop it. Just stop. He can’t go down that road again, because then he’d never be able to help Henry fix this (because they are, they have to), be there for Henry who is feeling just as much, or more, probably more right now. Because the second thing that went through Jack’s head after the deafening silence, after holy shit no, god no, and Allison was thank god for Henry’s heart defect.
And even then there was a little bit of his brain left to feel guilty for thinking it, but it’s still true. Because there is no one in this or any other universe that he’d rather have by his side when trying to fix the unfixable, solve the unsolvable problem. Because he knows, god does he know, that Henry deserves to be on that ship. More than deserves it. Deserves everything, is smarter than all of them. Henry always reminds him of that Douglas Adams quote Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. Because Henry’s one of those guys, he’s brilliant and amazing and knows enough to not want the power and responsibility and greed. Is unwilling to compromise himself. Smarter than all of them.
And holy shit what is this insanity about Henry losing the women he loves to science experiments? But no, they haven’t lost them, haven’t lost Grace or Fargo or Zane or Allison or any of them because they’re Eureka. They’re Eureka and they’re Jack and Henry and they can solve this, can figure out the impossible because they do this all the time and they have to and Jack (Henry, the whole damn town) can’t lose most of his (their) damn world, just can’t and shit, just breathe. Hyperventilating in your own damn bed is just so productive, idiot.
But it’s different this time. Four days. It’s been four days and they’re pretty much nowhere. They know that the ship never showed up on Titan, coms are down, all of the seventeen billion forms of communication and tracking are down and they still have no fucking clue where the ship was sent. Because they were hacked. Goddamn hacked. No computer malfunction and Jack has exactly one fucking person on his list of culprits and he’s going to fucking find her and make her fix it if it kills him. Beverly fucking Barlowe. It has to be her. Every single fucking time something this huge and insane and intricate happens, its always fucking her. Jack thinks back to all of the times he could have just killed her, could have just pulled out his service weapon and put a bullet through her goddamn brain. Jack, stop, stop it. You can’t go back in time (really, what about all of those random fucking timelines and loops and shit you’ve lived through, wanna talk about those buddy?). Okay, fuck, you can’t go back in time without really drastic fucking consequences. And stop it, you are not smart enough to do this and not fuck things up, calm the fuck down. Breathe, just breathe.
And it’s like losing them all again (they’re not fucking lost, stop it, goddamn) every time they run up against a problem and someone on the ship would be the best person to fix it. Best and fucking brightest up there, out there, where the fuck ever. And that’s the problem isn’t it? They don’t have the slightest clue where they are. And fuck if just the word, the thought of the word, hack makes Jack think of Zane and if not him, then Fargo and just come the hell on world. So Jack’s taken to asking Henry all of his questions. Questions about where they could have been taken to (any-fucking-where with a landing pad thing, stupid almost limitless technology), about the skill set of other Eureka residents (amazing, brilliant, vast, but not the caliber of those aboard), about what he was doing right this second and what they should do next (in the beginning Henry gave him technical chatter, later he just glared). One time in particular, Jack asked why no one else on Eureka could hack like Zane and Henry exploded a little. I’m sorry to disappoint you, Sheriff, but its not exactly common practice for a secret goddamn organization funded by the fucking military to employ known criminals. Jack had backed away slowly and not asked another questions for at least an hour, maybe two.
But if anyone deserved to have a monumental freak out, it was Henry. He was in charge of the ground crew. This was his area of control and someone broke in and stole it out from under him, stole his responsibility and his extended family and his wife. Henry is (was, maybe, Jack has a hard time keeping track sometimes) the mayor of this crazy-ass town. These are all his people, he knows all of them, better even than Jack. This is nearly everything he cares about in the world taken from him in one go and the blame placed securely (completely wrongly, but securely nonetheless) on his shoulders. And at one point, he finally does lose a little of his honestly amazing control. Senator Winn had been hounding him almost as much as Jack, but with more whining and fewer attempts at helping. She kept demanding answers where there just weren't any and then it finally crossed her mind about six hours in that no one was running GD. Both the director and the interim director were on the missing ship. The most qualified person to fill that position was, of course, Henry. And so she tried to order him away from the computer, the search, into the role that he had denied, shut down, refused in every single timeline/version of his life.
And Jack could only watch as what he thought of as Dark Henry came back into being. Jack hadn't seen Dark Henry since he and Grace had gotten back together. (His favorite Henry still was and would probably always be Overalls Henry. The man that he first met in Eureka with an endless set of velcro nametags and job descriptions who lived his whole life for fun. Too much had happened since then. But Jack still dreams sometimes of Henry getting back to that place, getting back to that simplicity and joy.) Dark Henry was determined and limitless and honestly a little terrifying.
Either way, Married Henry morphed into Dark Henry and turned to Senator Winn and with what could only be described as burning eyes, simply said no. There was no yelling or screaming or high pitched incredulity that Jack probably would have shown, just calm and low and dangerous. The entire ground control went silent and even Senator Winn stepped back a few paces. There was a moment when she stepped forward again, when it looked like she was going to try to pull rank, try to pull a desperate man away from the search for everything that mattered to him. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, Jack took the two steps needed to stand just behind Henry's right shoulder and did his best to match the burning defiance of his gaze. Without a word, the rest of the ground crew did the same. Words weren't necessary in the slightest, their intention was crystal clear. They were with Henry, they were behind and with and believed in Henry and there wasn't a damned thing short of a full military take over that she could do about it. And you could see the disbelief in her eyes as she walked away, stripped of power by the one man who didn't want any, got it simply because he never asked for it.
As soon as she left, everyone went back to work. Jack bit the bullet and began conversation again, suggesting to Henry that he use his still fairly sizable connections in the Marshals to track down Beverly. Because even on the incredibly slim chance that Beverley wasn't responsible, she would know more of who in the wide world would have the technology, the ability to do so. Dark Henry flashed again at her name, but it was Married Henry who agreed, telling Jack to use his judgment but to find her using any means necessary. And it was his own darker voice inside his head that convinced him to fill out an official report, to use her picture and send it out to every government agency that knew him, calling her a wanted person. Claiming kidnapping and assault and every other charge that Jack could come up with in this and every timeline he could remember. He considered it some of his best work and sent it off with the closest thing to a smile that he had cracked since the incident.
It wasn't until that first afternoon, though, that Jack realized the full implications of the hack and everything it meant to Eureka and to him. Because in his insanity, in his mind numbing pain and guilt and emotional turmoil at having no fucking clue how to fix this, he had forgotten about the kids. Allison's kids. Allison's kids who were supposed to be moving into his house and with Allison gone, who he was the most likely to have sole responsibility for. And so as much as it hurt, Jack left the investigation and went to pick up Kevin and talk to Jenna’s babysitter. Thankfully, with this being Eureka, Jenna’s babysitter, Alex, was a doctoral student who found the idea of her boss being incapacitated or busy for the foreseeable future to be pretty par for the course. If only it were that easy with Kevin.
At first it was. At first, Kevin treated it like any other Eureka disaster where he was worried, but not really all that freaked out. His Mom or Jack was in mortal peril probably about once a week so he had gotten a little jaded. But then the days stretched on and not only was there no solution, but there was no progress. No Allison, but also no hope. No kernel of maybe, maybe this could work, just nothing. And Kevin snapped, blamed Jack, blamed Eureka, blamed fucking science and life and God for taking away both of his parents. Leaving him only with Jack, who didn’t know shit about science or technology or how to get them back. Kevin just laid into him finally saying that he wished that it had been Jack in that ship, instead of any of those people because then they’d have a better chance. A better chance with anyone but Jack trying to find them.
And Jack could have quoted Andy, could have mentioned that even to the AI, the odds were always somehow better when Jack was around. But he knew that logic wouldn’t win this, logic had nothing to do with this. This was a terrified kid who had already lost his father and was terrified of losing his mother, too. So Jack took it and agreed. Took it and told him how he wished Zane or Fargo or Allison or Grace or anyone else who had the intelligence and ingenuity that he lacked was here. How he would gladly change places with any of them if he could. And it was that stark honesty that broke Kevin, drove him into Jack’s arms like the kid he hadn’t been for years, like the kid that Jack had never known.
And when he’d finished letting out all of that emotion, all of the terror and worry and doubt, he was exhausted. Jack led him up to bed and tucked him in, marveling at how he melted into Jack’s hand on his forehead. Awed at the quiet, slurred ‘m sorry, Jack, love you, please don’t go. But Kevin was dead asleep, didn’t feel Jack kiss him on the head or hear his I’ve got you kid, I’m here in reply. And then finally something went right as Zoe got home from college on winter break and became the rock that they all relied on. In true Carter fashion, his Mom would be so damn proud, she saw the stressed out emotionally unstable lot of them and immediately started mothering the hell out of them. She created sleep schedules and counseling sessions and just gave some much needed structure to their floundering.
She’s just so damn strong, standing up to physically and emotionally drained geniuses with a tendency to lash out. She gets that from Abby, that complete inability to stand down. His gorgeous baby girl just saw the lack of progress and created a long term plan. Saw the writing on the wall that the rest of them were refusing to see, that this wouldn’t be fixed quickly, that they wouldn’t get them all back in the blink of an eye. So his brilliant, amazing, stubborn girl gave them the framework to do this long term, to not burn out too quickly.
So that’s why he’s here being held hostage by his sentient house with orders from his daughter. Speaking of...
“S.A.R.A.H.?”
“Yes, Sheriff?”
“Would you, would you play it again?”
And S.A.R.A.H. sounds gentle, sympathetic, when she answers “Of course, Sheriff” in Fargo’s feminized voice.
What it consists of is a compilation of phrases stolen by S.A.R.A.H. from Eureka's security footage and in those home videos that he brought with him. His father’s voice saying Now remember boy and his mother’s So proud of you, Jackie. He’s got Zoe over the years calling him Daddy and in those months when she went back to her mother after she ran away saying I miss Eureka and home and you. Then there’s Jo’s surprised laughter and his sister's smiling voice saying something about herbs and balance that she believes to be integral to Jack’s life. Allison’s I love you, too, Jack and even Nathan’s singularly mocking and affectionate, but mostly mocking way of saying Sheriff. And lastly Henry, in that voice that means hope, that voice that means he has somehow parsed some asinine thing Jack has said into a miracle saying Actually, maybe we can. What if we...
And so Jack lets himself be lulled into an uneasy sleep by the sounds of everything he holds dear. Hopes beyond all hope that his baby girl is right and some rest is what they need, some rest and they’ll be able to think more clearly tomorrow.