**Hey everyone! I'm back and ready to go, with a whole new fandom to conquer - muahahaha! This is a fun little story I concocted a few days ago and have been writing ever since - part 1 of 6 in a series of vignettes looking back at the development of Jack Hudson and Sue Thomas's relationship, and specifically where Jack could have told Sue exactly how he felt (but, for whatever reason, he failed to do!)

The chapter titles are taken from songs by Joshua Radin that I thought worked well in the context of the chapter! A quick search on YouTube should bring you to the song so you can hear it, if you want to, while you read!

[Chapter soundtrack: "The Fear You Won't Fall" by Joshua Radin]

This first chapter takes place immediately after the events of 1.15, "Prodigal Father."

This story is purely speculative, and all aspects of the show belong to their respective creators and the producers, not me. Darn!**

- 1 -

The Fear You Won't Fall

There were a lot of very good reasons why Jack became paralyzed with fear at the thought of telling Sue how he felt. He had known, from the first moment he met her, that she was remarkable. She carried herself with the dignity of Audrey Hepburn, possessed the beauty of Rita Hayworth, and laughed like Gracie Allen. He didn't think it was a stretch to say that spending his days with her had given him a deeper insight into the human condition. She made him want to be a better man.

"I hope it works out the way you want it to."

He grimaced just thinking about the way he'd bungled the exchange in front of the elevator bank moments before. Even when confronted with his ex-girlfriend, Sue was selfless and beautiful and perfect... and those were just three reasons why he couldn't say the words he wanted to say.

Jack closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall of the elevator, exhaling loudly and feeling his stomach cave as the lift began its descent. She had given him the perfect opportunity to say something - "If you come with me now..." he could have said, or "I only want it to work out with you..." - and he'd blown it by bailing into the open elevator instead.

Taking the easy way out had never been his modus operandi, but where Sue was concerned, Jack could never seem to find his footing on that more difficult path.

So instead, he stood listless, stranded in the gulf between the person he had once been and the person he wanted to be. That was true now, just like it was true every other day of the week, and while he was getting more and more used to it, he was certain that his disappointment showed on his face. He simply hadn't yet reconciled the fact that the distance between his desk and Sue's might as well have been as wide as the Pacific.

Each of those things were more than reason enough for Jack to keep away, and together, they amounted to a wall he had yet to breach. The FBI could have been actively encouraging inter-office fraternization - the director himself could have offered to pay for their wedding! - and Jack's own moral compass would still have told him there was something less than savoury about dating one's co-worker. Never mind the fact that you are her training agent, he would remind himself constantly. Beautiful or not, he had to draw the line somewhere.

It all made him wonder: had she drawn the same line as well?

With a flicker of a smile, Jack remembered seeing her in the hospital. Everyone had been there to check in on him, and he'd done his best to joke and make light of the situation. But when she returned, alone, her face was etched with such worry. It wasn't the same kind of worry marking Bobby's or Lucy's faces. In Sue's eyes, Jack could have sworn he saw something different, something that went beyond simple friendship and camaraderie.

If she had drawn a line, she was playing jump rope with it as much as he was.

The elevator began to slow down, and Jack opened his eyes, right as the heavy doors began to slide open. He stepped out into the lobby, slowly, each step heavy and leaden; he tried stepping lightly, afraid he'd break through the marble floor each time his heel struck the ground. Allie was parked outside the large front doors. She waved at him, and he smiled a little and waved back, pushing open the doors and putting on his bravest face for her sake.

Allie talked a blue streak the entire way home, but Jack wasn't paying attention. He watched the trees and buildings of D.C. whirr by outside the window and counted pigeons every time the car came to a stop at a red light or a stop sign. He felt badly about it; Allie was a good woman, and he had loved her once. But he didn't know what to feel anymore.

As if on cue, Allie reached over across the gear shift and gave his hand a squeeze. "Are you bored? I can stop talking. You probably just want to rest, don't you?"

He shook his head and tried to find his voice, lodged deep in the back of his throat. "No, it's fine," he smiled.

"Okay."

Jack looked down at her hand, wrapped around his. There's nothing in this world quite like a good woman's touch, Jack, his father had told him years earlier. Jack had found that statement to be an inalienable truth in a world slowly going completely mad. He'd had girlfriends who could do that to him: women who could lay their fingers on his arm, or knead away the knots in his tense shoulders, and he'd be as pliable as Silly Putty in their hands. But none of them - not even Allie - could do what Sue could do. With her, it was so much more than her touch; a stolen glance could have the exact same effect as if she'd pulled him in for the kiss to end all kisses. There was so much power in her eyes, trained over years of signing to emote. Hell, she could curl her lip in a half-smile and he'd melt into a puddle beneath his desk.

No, Sue was definitely different. It was confirmed. In the moments before she found her way back to his hospital room, and in the moments after she left again, he felt jumbled, disconnected, and was trying very hard to relax in spite of it all. But when Sue's warm hand had found his, he figured he had to be dreaming, because he swore he felt her her pulse - her heartbeat - through her palm and the tips of her fingers. Ironic, that. There he'd been, hooked up to IVs and dosed with mexilitene to keep his heart beating properly, and all she had to do was take his hand in hers to get him back in synch.

As Allie's long, tapered fingers laced their way through his, he felt... nothing.

In the quiet stillness of his empty bachelor apartment that night, once Allie had left for her hotel, Jack paced the floor staring at his phone, clutching Sue's number in the other hand. Twice, he dialed everything but the last number before hanging up in frustration. But after chastising himself for acting like a lovestruck teenager, he felt a wave of fatigue drift over his body, dragging his eyelids down to cover his eyes even as he stood there, leaning over the sink. So he turned down the lights and crawled into a freshly made bed, two sizes too big for one man, and as he lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, he concentrated on his heart, willing it to beat the way Sue had made it beat.

He'd been right that day in the hospital when he told her how terrified he'd been knowing his own heart had been out of his control.

He chuckled. "In more ways than one," he muttered to no one as the edges of his reality blurred, obscuring the boundary between waking and sleep.

If he hadn't still been holding his phone, he never would have heard it ring. He fumbled to answer it, swinging his arm up from under the covers and slamming himself in the side of the head before connecting the call on the third ring.

"Ow!" he cried out, unwittingly, into the receiver. "Hello?"

There was a pause, as his voice translated into text for her to read. "Jack?" Sue's voice finally sounded on the other end. "Were you sleeping?"

His eyes snapped open and his pain disappeared. "No... no, I'm still up," he smiled. "Just resting."

"Good to hear." He could tell she was smiling too. "I just wanted to call and see how you were doing."

"Great," he said. "Feeling better already."

"I'm glad," she said. "It's good to know Allie will be there to take care of you."

"Oh, she's at her hotel now," Jack blurted out.

"Oh."

Jack winced at the out-of-place comment. And then the thought struck him all at once. She's given you a golden opportunity, Jack... there's no elevator to dive in to! Don't blow it this time! He cleared his throat and closed his eyes.

"Speaking of Allie... Sue, about this afternoon... ."

"What about it?"

"Well... I-I didn't quite get a chance to... I mean, the elevator... ."

"Uh-huh?"

"You see...," he sighed, losing his nerve. I think I'm falling in love with you, Sue Thomas. And I can't stop thinking about you! And if I didn't tell you that, I was afraid I might explode, and that's all there is to it... .

"Jack?"

"...I guess what I'm trying to say is... ."

"Yes?"

Another sigh. He placed his hand over his chest and felt the vibrations of his heart beat running up his arm, into his shoulder, to the place where Sue's hands had to expertly massaged away his tension days earlier.

He couldn't say it. A million reasons stood between them. But in that moment, the one that stuck out the most for him was the very palpable fear that she wouldn't say it back... .

"Sue...," his voice caught in his throat, but a calamity on the other end of the phone stopped him cold.

"Oh, I'm so sorry Jack, but I have to go," she laughed. "Levi got into my ice cream!"

Jack smiled. "Oh, all right then," he said, and then, out of habit, "I'll see you in the morning."

"No you won't," she was grinning. "You'll be in bed. Resting."

"Right," he nodded. "Well then... ."

"Good night, Jack. And get better," she ordered, her voice softening around the words. "We miss you."

Her phone clicked as she hung up, and Jack held it close for a moment before tucking it away on the bedside table. He still heard her last words to him ringing in his head.

She's too good, too beautiful, too perfect to be touched, Jack told himself. Besides, you're her boss. And she'll never say it back to you.

Five good reasons right there. He looked at his hand, five fingers stretched out. Fingers to hold. Fingers to spell. Fingers to count the ways in which he'd never get close to the one person he wanted more than anything.

Jack exhaled and clenched his hand under his pillow, out of sight, while he drifted off into his dreams... .